By Anita Dangazele
- South Africa’s average monthly salary is around R29,500, according to Stats SA, but the true middle-ground figure is closer to R27,200.
- A small number of highly paid executives and professionals pull the national average up, while most workers earn far less, many at or near minimum wage.
If you’ve seen headlines saying the average South African earns around R29,500 a month, and that number doesn’t look anything like your own payslip, you’re not alone, and you’re not wrong to be suspicious of it.
That figure comes from Stats SA’s own Quarterly Employment Statistics survey, and it’s technically accurate. The problem is what “average” actually means here. An average is calculated by adding up everyone’s salary and dividing by the number of people, which means a small number of very high earners can pull the whole number upward, even if most people earn far less.
A more honest picture comes from looking at the median instead of the average, the salary right in the middle, where exactly half of all workers earn more and half earn less. That figure sits closer to R27,200, still higher than what most Scrolla readers earn, but noticeably lower than the average, and dragged down much less by a handful of very high salaries.
The reason for the gap is straightforward. Financial services, mining, and technology jobs in places like Johannesburg and Cape Town pay some of the highest salaries in the country. Meanwhile, retail, agriculture and hospitality, industries that employ far more people, pay wages at or close to the national minimum wage, which currently works out to around R5,000 for a full month’s work. That’s the same minimum wage we’ve reported on extensively, and it’s already been shown to fall well short of what a family needs just to eat properly.
South Africa’s inequality shows up clearly in the numbers behind this gap. The country’s Gini coefficient, a standard measure economists use to show how unequal income is across a population, sits at around 0.63, one of the highest levels of inequality recorded anywhere in the world.
So the next time you see a headline about the “average South African salary,” it’s worth remembering that number is real, but it was never built to describe what most people actually take home each month.
Pictured above: For most workers, the “average salary” describes almost nobody’s actual paycheque.
Image source: File
