How much does NZ pay?
The Herald has a story about NZ average wage figures published by the job-search website Seek.
Seek’s latest salary report, released today, showed the average salary for jobs advertised on their website, grew to $72,731 per annum – a 1.3 per cent increase on wages since January.
The problem is that this is an average for a set of ads. It’s not an average for NZ workers as a whole, but it’s not even an average for people who apply for Seek jobs, or even people who get Seek jobs.
The Herald sensibly reports the average hourly wage that StatsNZ computes.
Figures from Statistics NZ show as of March this year, the average hourly wage was $27.48 or $57,158.40 per year.
Another useful figure is the median weekly income from wage or salary for those receiving some wage or salary, allowing for part-time and overtime work, which the NZ Income Survey estimates (for June 2012) as $806, giving a yearly figure of $42000.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Also, I have always wondered how do they calculate that? There is a pay range for every job advertised. Do they use the the lower end or higher end or mean value of that range?
The results is overly optimistic about average pay and can be stressful for many readers (as they may not be paid as high as that).
Not sure what is the practical importance of that figure to the general public. Tell them that Seek has some higher than average pay jobs? Misleading is the word!
11 years ago