It stands at 2,038 euros gross per month, but a third of workers earn less than 1,336 euros
The pandemic has not made a dent in workers’ wages, probably thanks to ERTEs. On the contrary, their income rose for the first time in history above 2,000 gross euros per month, although the inequalities between them soared. This is at least reflected in the survey on the salary decile of the main job published this Tuesday by the INE, which places the average salary at 2,038.6 euros in 2020 after rebounding 2.8%, the second highest salary growth in the last decade. This assumes that wage earners earn on average 56.3 euros more each month than a year ago.
It should be noted, however, that most workers do not earn these 2,000 euros per month. Not much less. The median salary, which is the one that divides the group of workers into two parts, reduces to 1,706.4 euros per month. Its increase was less than half that of the average salary: just 1.3%, that is, 22.1 euros more each month. This means that half of the wage earners earn more than 1,706 euros per month, while the other half earn less.
However, what has exacerbated the pandemic are wage inequalities between those who earn the most and those who earn the least, a gap that grew by 7.2% last year.
In reality, the largest group, made up of 40% of employees, more than 6.4 million people, had a gross monthly salary between 1,336.6 and 2,295.2 euros. Then there would be a second group made up of 30% of employees who are in the high salary bracket, made up of some 4,831,150 employees who have a gross monthly salary of at least 2,295.2 euros in 2020. On the other side, another The same percentage is in the low wage zone, made up of another 4.8 million people who earned less than 1,336.6 euros gross per month in 2020.
Women, young people, people with a lower level of training, workers with less seniority in companies and those hired temporarily have the lowest wages, as extracted from this statistic. Thus, almost four out of ten women received a salary of less than 1,336.6 euros per month, compared to one in five men. The percentage of young people under 25 years of age who earn less than 1,336.6 euros per month rises to 61%, a figure that falls to 24.6% among wage earners who are 55 years of age or older. In this way, the average gross salary of young people was 1,207.1 euros per month in 2020, almost half that of those over 55 years of age (2,361.2 euros).
For its part, the average female salary stood at 1,852 euros per month in 2020, above the 1,773.3 euros in 2019, while the average salary for men increased in 2020 to 2,210.3 euros per month. In this way, the average male salary is 19.3% higher than that of women, a difference that has been reduced by three points compared to 2019, when this gap was 22.5%.
.