International Salary Comparison: Tax Wedge Across Countries

Aynı brüt maaş, ülkeye göre %15'ten fazla fark yaratır. OECD vergi kaması verilerine göre ortalama ücretli bekâr bir çalışan Avustralya'da brütünün %76,5'ini elinde tutar; Almanya'da bu oran %61,3'e düşer. Fark, gelir vergisinden çok çalışan sosyal güvenlik primi ve işveren katkılarından gelir.

Comparing salaries across countries: the tax wedge

Gross salary comparisons between countries are close to meaningless on their own, because the gap between what an employer pays and what a worker keeps varies enormously. The OECD measures that gap as the tax wedge: total taxes on labour — income tax plus employee and employer social contributions — as a share of total labour cost. For a single worker on an average wage, the United States wedge is 30.0 percent, the United Kingdom 32.4 percent, Canada 32.1 percent, Australia 27.9 percent and Germany 49.3 percent.

The table above breaks the wedge into its parts. Income tax is the piece most people think of first, but it is rarely the largest. Germany's income tax on an average wage is 17.2 percent — lower than Australia's 23.5 percent — yet Germany's total wedge is nearly twice Australia's, because employee social contributions add 21.5 percent on top. Australia, by contrast, funds most social programmes through general taxation and charges no employee social contribution at all.

Take-home share, not tax rate

The more intuitive way to read the same data is as the share of gross pay a worker keeps. On an average wage, an Australian worker keeps 76.5 percent, a British worker 76.9 percent, an American 75.7 percent, a Canadian 74.4 percent and a German 61.3 percent. The gap between the highest and lowest on that list is more than fifteen percentage points of gross pay — a larger difference than most people assume when comparing salaries across borders.

It is worth noting that these figures describe an average-wage single worker with no children. The OECD also publishes figures for married couples and families with children, and those move substantially, because child benefits and family-based credits are counted in the calculation. A single figure cannot describe every household.

What this comparison deliberately excludes

Tax is only one input into a cross-border decision, and this page does not pretend otherwise. It does not include cost of living, which varies far more between countries than tax rates do, nor healthcare arrangements, which are delivered through different structures in each of the five countries. It does not model pension entitlements, which are deferred compensation and differ in value as much as they differ in cost. And it does not include local or regional taxes, which exist in several of these countries on top of national rates.

What it does provide is the part of the comparison that is directly measurable and directly comparable: how much of a gross salary reaches a worker's bank account after mandatory deductions, according to a single consistent methodology applied to all five countries.

Source and method

All figures come from the OECD Taxing Wages series, which is published annually and uses a standardised model of a single worker at the average wage. The US panel on this page converts the OECD proportions into dollar amounts on a normalised $100,000 gross salary so the comparison can be read alongside the rest of the site. Because the OECD report uses each country's own currency in its underlying model, percentages — not converted dollar figures — are the correct basis for comparison, and that is how the table is built.

Who actually pays the wedge

The tax wedge is larger than the sum of the deductions a worker sees on a payslip, because it includes employer social contributions as well as employee ones. An employer contribution is not deducted from gross pay, but it is part of the cost of employing someone, and OECD methodology counts it in the wedge for that reason.

That distinction explains the German figure in particular. A German worker's visible deductions are income tax at 17.2 percent and employee social contributions at 21.5 percent, and their take-home share is 61.3 percent of gross pay. The remaining portion of Germany's 49.3 percent wedge comes from employer contributions, which sit on top of gross pay rather than inside it. Australia's position at the other end of the scale reflects the opposite structure: income tax at 23.5 percent, no employee social contribution at all, and a wedge of 27.9 percent.

Why the comparison uses percentages

The five countries in this table report in different currencies, and converting them into a single currency would introduce exchange-rate movement into a comparison that is really about tax structure. Using percentages of gross pay removes that distortion: 76.9 percent of gross pay in the United Kingdom is comparable to 76.5 percent in Australia regardless of what either currency is worth on a given day. Where a dollar figure is needed, this site normalises gross pay to $100,000 so the country panel can be read alongside the American pages.

Ülkelere göre vergi yükü (ortalama ücretli, bekâr)

Frequently asked questions

Kaynaklar ve yöntem

• Ülke karşılaştırması: OECD Taxing Wages 2026 (ortalama ücretli, bekâr çalışan).

Bu sayfadaki görsel panel ile aşağıdaki tablolar aynı veri kaynaklarını kullanır; hesaplamalar tarayıcıda gerçek zamanlı, tablolar ise yayın anındaki gerçek değerlerle üretilmiştir.