Average monthly earnings
Mean gross monthly earnings of employees, converted to US dollars.
How it is measured
National labour force and establishment surveys standardized by the ILO.
Where the number came from
Wage statistics are among the oldest official statistics in existence, gathered by labour departments from the late nineteenth century onward because industrial disputes needed agreed facts. Standardising them internationally fell to the ILO, whose International Conference of Labour Statisticians has been refining the definitions of earnings, wages, and labour cost since the 1920s; the current framework distinguishes gross earnings, which is what this field reports, from take-home pay after tax and from the total cost of employing someone including employer contributions. Those three numbers can differ by a factor of two for the same job in the same country, which is the single commonest source of confusion when people compare wages across borders. ILOSTAT is the modern home of the series, and it has been openly licensed under CC BY since 2023, which is why we can republish it.
Worked example: India and the United States, before and after the price correction
Our figures put average monthly earnings in the United States at about $6,273 for 2025 and in India at roughly $255 for 2025, a nominal ratio close to 25 to 1. Now apply the price level field on this site: India sits near 23 against the United States at 100, so Indian earnings buy roughly four and a third times what the same dollars buy in America. The real gap in living standards is therefore closer to six to one than to twenty-five to one. Six to one is still an enormous difference, and it is the honest one. Two further adjustments matter before using either number. These are gross earnings, so they are before income tax and employee social contributions, which take a far larger share in most of Europe than in India or the United States; Poland at roughly $2,302 and Mexico near $551 look different again on a take-home basis. And the population covered is employees only. In the United States that is the large majority of workers. In India it is a minority, with most of the workforce self-employed, in casual labour or in the informal sector, and their incomes are not in this figure at all. So the Indian number is an accurate statement about Indian employees and a poor proxy for Indian incomes, which is exactly the distinction the field name is trying to make.
Figures read from our own average monthly earnings table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
ILOSTAT (EAR_EMTA_SEX_CUR_NB_A), CC BY 4.0. Where the ILO publishes a country only in local currency, we convert at the World Bank exchange rate for that observation’s own year.
Refresh cadence: Country vintages vary widely (2019-2025); every figure shows its year.
What to watch for
Covers employees only: the self-employed and informal workers, most of the workforce in many countries, are excluded. Means sit above medians wherever earnings are skewed. Coverage stops at about 140 countries because most remaining territories do not collect a wage statistic at all, not because a better source is being withheld.