Before I made my most recent major international move, I needed to know that when I found a job in Ireland, I would be able to live comfortably and, most importantly, support my young family. To do that I started looking online for salary surveys, and places that breakdown the average salary level for various careers in Ireland. I found numerous resources that had relevant information but two of those stood out and are worthwhile taking a look at.

Morgan McKinley
The first website I'd recommend you check out is morganmckinley.ie. Morgan McKinkley is a global recruitment agency. Like many other recruitment agencies they work to match you up with an employer. I don't have any personal experience with this company, and this is not meant to be an endorsement of their services, but I would definitely recommend their salary survey. They cover a number of career fields including Accountancy & Finance, Engineering, Banking & Financial Services, HR, IT, Sales & Marketing, Science, Supply Chain, Tax, Practice & Legal. They break each category down into a longer list of individual job roles, and from there give you estimates of salary by years of experience and city of employment. In some cases they break it down further by the size of the company. Other useful pieces of information on their salary survey include the top 3 most in-demand positions for each category, types of benefits you can expect (e.g. medical insurance, bonus, time off), hourly rates and more. It's a very useful resource for any job-seeker in Ireland.

average salaries in ireland

PayScale.com
What I like about PayScale.com is that for each job profile that they list, they tell you exactly how many people they are basing their statistics against. This helps you determine if the average salary for the career you're interested in is based on a decent size data sample. Click through to a job profile that interests you, and you will see plenty of useful data e.g. median/high/low income for that career, job satisfaction, male to female ratio, etc. Also, for many of the career pages I viewed, I could see adverts for jobs in that field (courtesy of indeed.com), which may help you start your job search.

Minimum rate of pay in Ireland
While researching information for this article, I found myself looking at the minimum wage rate in Ireland and figured it'd be a good idea to include it here. It came as a bit of a shock to me to see how the minimum wage rates are structured. To be quite honest I think it is an unfair and outdated way of paying people, but that's just my opinion. What bothers me about it is that somebody has to be working a minimum of 2 years before they are eligible for the highest rate of minimum pay. That's not to say that employers can't pay the higher rate, but I'm sure many don't.

Here's the breakdown (as of 1 July 2011 and still current as of October 2014):

  • An experienced adult worker is entitled to €8.65 per hour. According to citizensinformation.ie "an experienced adult employee for the purposes of the National Minimum Wage Act is an employee who has an employment of any kind in any 2 years over the age of 18".
  • The minimum wage rate for anyone under the age of 18 is €6.06 per hour.
  • A person aged over 18 who has worked 1 year is entitled to €6.92
  • A person aged over 18 who has worked 2 years is entitled to €7.79

Visit citizensinformation.ie for the most up-to-date information on this topic. Also, if you are currently job seeking I'd recommend you take a look at this article which will help you get started with your job search.