"Doesn't everyone make 4 million won a month?"... A look at actual salaries tells a different story

[Financial News] The oft-cited "average annual salary of 45 million won" for Korean office workers is heavily skewed by a small group of high earners and is far removed from what most employees actually take home.

According to 2024 wage data submitted by the National Tax Service to People Power Party lawmaker Park Sung-hoon of the National Assembly Planning and Finance Committee on the 18th, the average earned income per worker in Korea was about 45 million won a year, or 3.75 million won a month.
However, the median annual salary — the income of the person in the exact middle when all workers are lined up by earnings — was only 34.17 million won, or 2.85 million won a month. That is 10.83 million won lower than the average of 45 million won, meaning roughly half of workers do not even earn 3 million won a month before tax.

The higher up the income ladder, the wider the gap became.
The average annual salary of the top 10% of workers was 91.17 million won, about twice the overall average. For the top 1%, the average pay reached 346.3 million won, eight times the overall average. The ultra-high-income top 0.1%, a group of only about 20,000 people, earned an average of 999.37 million won a year, more than 22 times the overall average.
By contrast, excluding the top 20% of earners, whose average salary was 65.34 million won, the remaining 80% of workers had an average annual income of around 30 million won. In other words, eight out of ten employees do not even receive the statistical average salary, and actual income levels are clustered well below the headline figure of 45 million won. Analysts say extremely high salaries at the very top have pulled up the overall average and distorted perceptions of what workers really earn.
Against this backdrop, some argue that policies should be based on a more accurate picture of the income distribution so that workers do not feel left behind because of the illusion created by simple averages.
newssu@fnnews.com Reporter Kim Su-yeon Reporter