Gender Pay Gap Statistics in Australia

What the gender pay gap measures

The gender pay gap is the difference between women’s and men’s average earnings, expressed as a percentage of men’s earnings. It compares pay across the whole workforce rather than pay for the same job, so it reflects differences in the industries, jobs, seniority and hours of women and men. It is not the same as unequal pay for equal work, which WGEA notes has been a legal requirement in Australia since 1969.

For a fuller explanation, read Understanding the Gender Pay Gap.

The national gender pay gap

Australia’s national gender pay gap was 11.3% in May 2026. It compares the average weekly ordinary time earnings of full-time adult employees: $2,181.00 for men and $1,934.50 for women. The difference is $246.50 a week, or about $12,818 over a year. For every dollar men earned, women earned about 89 cents.

The gap narrowed from 11.5% in November 2025. It is the lowest since the ABS series began in November 1994, when it stood at 16.2%, and well below its peak of 18.6% in November 2014.

This is the figure WGEA reports as the national gender pay gap. It counts base pay for full-time adults only, so it excludes overtime, amounts salary sacrificed and superannuation, and leaves out part-time and junior employees.

Why you see different figures

Official gender pay gap figures for Australia range from 8.4% to 26.1%. Each is correct for what it measures. They differ because they count different kinds of pay for different groups of workers.

• Hourly measures give smaller gaps. They remove the effect of hours worked. Men work more paid hours each week than women on average, including among full-time workers.
• Weekly measures across all employees give the largest gaps. They include part-time workers, and almost half of employed women work part-time.
• Medians are smaller than averages. A small number of people on the highest incomes pull averages up, and the ABS notes this effect is stronger for men’s earnings.
• Counting salary sacrifice narrows the gap. Women salary sacrifice more than men on average, so cash earnings measures, which include it, give smaller gaps.
• WGEA’s employer figure is higher because it counts total remuneration, including super, overtime and bonuses, and converts part-time and casual pay to full-time equivalents. WGEA puts it about 10 percentage points above the national figure.

By state and territory

Western Australia had the largest gap in May 2026, at 18.2%, and Tasmania the smallest, at 1.3%. WGEA links Western Australia’s gap to its full-time workforce, which has a larger share of mining and construction jobs than other states. Those industries pay well and employ few women.

State figures move more between releases than the national figure, especially in the smaller states and territories. On WGEA’s employer measure the pattern is similar: in 2024–25, Western Australia had the largest gap (28.8%) and Tasmania the smallest (10.6%).

By industry

The largest gaps in May 2026 were in administrative and support services (24.3%) and health care and social assistance (24.2%). These two are too close to rank against each other, because the ABS’s published standard errors for them are larger than the difference.

The smallest gaps were in public administration and safety (3.9%) and construction (3.1%). In other services, women working full time earned 3.8% more than men on average.

Public and private sector

Women working full time in the public sector earned $2,154.00 a week in May 2026, against $2,399.30 for men: a gap of 10.2%. In the private sector the gap was 14.0% ($1,840.80 against $2,139.50).

What drives the gap

WGEA lists these as the main causes of the gender pay gap:

• conscious and unconscious bias in hiring and pay decisions
• women and men working in different industries and jobs, with female-dominated work attracting lower wages
• too little workplace flexibility for caring responsibilities, especially in senior roles
• high rates of part-time work among women
• more time out of the workforce for caring, which affects career progression
• a larger share of unpaid caring and domestic work

We look at how these combine in Why the Gender Pay Gap Persists in Australia, and at the effect on retirement savings in Women’s Superannuation in Australia.

How we checked these figures

Every figure on this page comes from the ABS or WGEA and links to its source. Figures marked as our calculation apply the formula the ABS and WGEA use, (men’s earnings − women’s earnings) ÷ men’s earnings, to published ABS tables.

We tested the method by reproducing WGEA’s published figures for November 2025. The national gap and seven of the eight state and territory gaps match exactly. The ACT differs by 0.1 points because the ABS has since revised its seasonally adjusted series. All figures were last checked on 30 September 2026.