Average Pay Rise Australia 2026: What's Normal, What's Fair, What to Target

For the year to December 2025, the average Australian pay rise was:

• 3.2% — ABS Wage Price Index (all sectors, Dec 2025). This is the cleanest measure because it controls for changes in workforce composition (promotions, mix shifts) and only tracks the same roles.
• 3.6% — ABS CPI (annual, Dec 2025). Inflation. If your pay rise beat this, your real income grew. If not, it shrank.
• 3.75% — Fair Work Annual Wage Review 2024-25. Applied from 1 July 2025 to the National Minimum Wage and all Modern Award minimums. About 20.7% of Australian employees are paid directly off an award — so this flowed through automatically.

Translation: if you got a 3.2% rise or higher, you're in line with the average. If you got 3.6%+, you held real income steady. If you got less than 3.6%, your purchasing power went backwards.

Use our Pay Rise Calculator to see what your number should have been based on your role, tenure, and market position.

The ABS Wage Price Index splits private and public sectors. For the year to December 2025:

• Private sector: 3.2% annual growth
• Public sector: 3.1% annual growth

This is an unusual pattern — historically public sector has trailed private. Recent enterprise agreements in federal and state government (especially in NSW and Victoria health and education) have pulled public wages closer to private.

Note: these are averages across all employees. Individual raises inside each sector range widely — from 0% (many employers passed on only the minimum) to double digits (scarce skills, retention packages, promotions).

ABS Wage Price Index data by industry (annual to Dec 2025, private sector):

• Accommodation and food services: 4.1% — driven by hospitality award flow-through and staff shortages
• Healthcare and social assistance: 3.9% — aged care reforms lifting baselines
• Education and training: 3.7% — new EBAs in state schools and universities
• Construction: 3.5% — project pipeline supporting demand
• Retail trade: 3.4% — award flow-through
• Manufacturing: 3.2%
• Mining: 3.1% — flattening after the 2022-24 resources boom
• Financial and insurance services: 3.0% — cost pressure, margin squeeze on banks
• Professional, scientific and technical services: 3.0% — tech layoffs through 2024-25 muted growth
• Information media and telecommunications: 2.8% — weakest performer, reflecting the wider tech slowdown

If you work in tech, finance, or media and only got 3%, you're in line with your industry. If you work in hospitality, healthcare, or education and only got 3%, you're trailing.

Separate ABS and SEEK data consistently shows:

• Job-stayers (people who stay with the same employer for the full year): average rise ~3–4%
• Job-changers (people who moved employer during the year): average rise ~9–12%, sometimes 15%+ for in-demand roles

This gap has been 5–8 percentage points for most of the last decade. It's the clearest market signal in Australian wages: if you're well below market, changing employer is the fastest route to correcting it. Not "the right" route, not "the most loyal" route — just the fastest.

This is also why internal retention negotiations work best when you have an external offer in hand. Your employer knows the gap exists and will often match partway (they don't want to re-hire and re-train you) but won't volunteer the number unprompted.

The average is a floor, not a target. A fair pay rise is:

• At least CPI (3.6%) — so your real income doesn't shrink. This is non-negotiable unless you've just started the role.
• At least your industry WPI — so you keep pace with peers in the same sector.
• Plus a premium if you're below market median — the gap between your current pay and the ATO + ABS median for your role should close each year, not stay constant.
• Plus a further premium for exceptional performance, expanded scope, or overdue reviews — these are case-specific.

A worked example. A senior accountant in Sydney on $95,000 who got 3.5% ($3,325) might feel fine — until you check the ATO data: the median for senior accountants is $102,000. They should have been targeting $103,000 (the median plus a small premium for 12 months of tenure), a 8.4% rise, not 3.5%. The 3.5% rise locked in a gap that will compound every year they don't close it.

Use our Pay Rise Calculator to run this for your own role in 30 seconds.

About one in five Australian employees is paid directly at the Modern Award minimum. For this group, the Fair Work Commission's Annual Wage Review sets the pay rise — the employer has no discretion to pay less (and often chooses not to pay more). For the last five reviews, the FWC has awarded:

• 2020: 1.75%
• 2021: 2.5%
• 2022: 4.6% (real wage defence)
• 2023: 5.75%
• 2024-25: 3.75%

The 2025-26 decision will be handed down by the Full Bench in early June 2026, effective 1 July. Based on current submissions and inflation trends, most commentators expect 3.0%–3.5%. If you're award-paid, this is your rise — no negotiation. If you're paid above award, the decision still matters because it anchors what's considered "fair" across the workforce for the next 12 months.

Check your award and classification using our Award Pay Rates tool.

Averages hide a wide range. Inside every industry figure above there are people who got 0% and people who got 20%. Your outcome depends on your employer, your role, your performance, your negotiating position, and a dozen other factors that a national statistic can't see.

What these numbers do give you is an anchor. Walking into a pay rise conversation saying "I'd like more" is losing. Walking in saying "industry average was 3.4%, I'm asking for 5% given my scope change and market gap" is winning. The data is the difference.