Highest wages of the 20 most common jobs in Australia revealed

New data has revealed not only the 20 best paid jobs in Australia but also the wages of the 20 most common jobs – and there are huge disparities.

How much money does your mate make?

You could ask them. But it’s awkward. Simpler just to read this article, which I made after digging into a new data release where the ATO reveals all the info from all the taxpayers in Australia in 2019-20.

Here are the top 20 – the professions with the dazzling incomes. The good news is that helping people still pays: The top three jobs are all doctors. For example, male surgeons report income of almost half a million bucks every year, on average. Must be nice!

Other than medical people, the rest is law, mining, business and finance. They’re all making enough to keep the Porsche dealership ticking over.

In the chart above, the blue bar shows how much income men make and the red bar shows how much women make. In some of the top professions, the gap between the sexes is smaller, like among engineering managers. And in others, it’s massive: Barristers stand out. Female barristers make about as much as high school teachers on average.

The difference may have some acceptable explanations, like a woman choosing part-time hours. It may also have unacceptable explanations, like promotions going to men, not women. The data doesn’t reveal its secrets on that front.

But you know what? There aren’t that many surgeons. The jobs above might not be what your mate does for work. What about the jobs lots of people have?

I decided to dig into the data differently, and find the biggest jobs in Australia. The most common ones. Number one is sales assistants, and they make $33,308 a year (females) or $35,797 (men). Thank god for Medicare because I don’t see how the 360,000 sales assistants in Australia could ever afford lifesaving surgery if they needed it otherwise. Those surgeon salaries have to come from somewhere.

Here’s the chart of the biggest professions. What you might notice is that nurses, who stand there right next to the surgeons, are the second most common job, and their compensation is nowhere near as high as the person they hand the scalpel too.

One job appears on both lists we’ve seen so far and it’s CEO. The average is pulled up by people like the Woolworths boss, who got paid over $8 million last year, but the ranks are filled out by lots and lots of people who run much smaller companies and get paid pretty average amounts.

I’m also fascinated by the tiny red dot that is female truckies. They are making almost as much as their male counterparts, which hints at progressiveness but when I stop for fuel on the highway, everyone climbing out of the cab of a semi-trailer seems to be a man.

But the biggest mystery about female truckies isn’t why there aren’t more of them. It’s why they’re so generous: The ATO data shows the charitable donations for every profession at every tax bracket in Australia. There are only 28 female truckies in the country who make over $180,000 a year. But somehow that group donated $2.6 million to charity. Which means their average donation is over $200,000: four times as high as the next highest group and 400 times as high as the richest male truckies.

My best guess is a truck driver won the lottery and gave a lot to charity. Maybe she donated all of it because she loves driving so much, and she is still out there, swearing into her CB radio and stopping for a schnitzel on the side of the Hume.

Last we should have a look at the sort of jobs you thought you’d be doing when you were six years old and had no idea what a database administrator was. The sort of job other people understand: Uniform jobs.

As the chart shows, there are a lot of struggling sportspeople out there. The defence forces are not your best bet. Police looks to be the sweet spot for decent pay and reasonable female representation.

But of course if you’re choosing jobs based on what you’ve seen in TV I’d recommend All Saints (doctors) over Blue Heelers (cops).

Jason Murphy is an economist | @jasemurphy. He is the author of the book Incentivology.