Salaries are one of the most important issues for workers and are the means of subsistence for most households. Although it is more common to talk about the average salary in Spain, the data is made up of large differences between the lowest and highest salaries and can give a distorted picture of the population’s salary. The INE published this Monday the “Salary Structure Survey 2022”, which presents the most common salary data in Spain: 14,586 euros gross per year. This is 1,042 euros per month in 14 installments.
“A characteristic of the wage distribution functions is that there are many more workers at low values than at the highest wages. This fact makes the average wage higher than both the median wage and the most frequent wage,” explains the National Institute of Statistics.
Thus, the average annual salary per worker was 26,949 euros in 2022, or 1,925 euros per month in 14 payments, or 4.1% more than the previous year. It should be remembered that 2022 was a year marked by very high inflation, particularly in basic materials, such as food.
The median salary, obtained by dividing the total number of workers into two equal parts (those with a higher salary and those with a lower salary), this year amounts to 22,383 euros, or 1,599 euros per month in 14 salaries.
For its part, the “modal” salary (the one with the highest frequency, with 4.2% of employees) was around 14,586 euros, although salaries of 16,495 euros also had a similar frequency (4.2% of total employees) and 18,494 euros per year (4.1%).
“The minimum interprofessional wage (SMI) has moved low salaries to 14,000-15,000 euros, making this range the most common,” explains the INE. The other two periods mentioned also increased their number of employees, but to a lesser extent.
In total, one in five workers, or 20.5% of employees, earned an annual profit of between 14,000 and 19,000 euros.
The gender gap is narrowing
The average salary of men increased by 3.5% to 9,381 euros per year and that of women by 5.1% to 24,360 euros. Thus, as women’s salaries increased on average more, the gender gap, which persists, was reduced. “The average salary of women was therefore 82.9% of that of men,” says the INE.
Women are more prevalent among the lowest wages, with 70% earning twice the minimum wage or less, compared to 60% of men, leading to a greater impact from rising low wages.
The INE specifies that this difference in average wages “must be qualified according to other work variables”, such as the type of working day or the profession, which impact the determination of the salary. These matters, in which there are also gender gaps, do not fully explain the difference in wages between men and women, with many data repeating this disparity.
