So, how much do you make?

I conducted an informal study of 200+ people and boy did I get good data

Dec 31, 2024

Hi everyone!

I haven’t used this Substack in a while but this seems like a great place to rejuvenate it. I’ll probably write here whenever the inspiration strikes (as it has today), about what I’m reading or listening to, or in today’s case, “research” I conducted. Because HOW FUN!

Last week, I asked my Instagram audience of ~25k people:

It came up because I posted a reel on IG around first learning that 100k+ was a real salary normal people made. I worked in non-profits for the first few years of my career, with a salary hovering around ~30k. At the offices where I worked (first in academic administration and then a non-profit organization), even the directors or managers were making 70k, with master’s degrees and decades of experience! After a few years, I got into my first corporate job as a coordinator and my salary jumped to 62k (I cried when I got that offer btw). I learned FAST just how little I understood about salary ceilings. People around me making 120k, 150k, Directors making 300k.

I say all that to say that I believe that on this topic more information is better, even when it stings or frustrates or stresses you out (I’ll never forget a coworker telling me I was underpaid. Her words were “oh girl, you’re being really underpaid.” I remember it verbatim. I immediately got off the call and cried— many tears shed over salaries for me, clearly. But that was a pivotal moment. I left that job soon after.)

Within seconds of posting that q&a box on Instagram, the answers started rolling in; soon I was at 100 answers. When someone suggested I anonymize it even further by adding an ngl link (more info on ngl if you’re curious), I got an additional 100+ answers.

I want to share these answers out. I’ve made a view-only Google Sheets with the raw data if you want to see them all listed out

📌SEE ALL THE NUMBERS HERE📌

In this newsletter, I’ll highlight some super interesting trends and higher level observations from the data.

My imperfect methodology

~number one caveat being I’m not a trained researcher or particularly good at Excel functions so if you find inconsistencies WHOOPS (and do let me know)

It’s hard to know what kinds of people might NOT have written in (maybe fear of their job finding out, or self-consciousness about the number etc.)
If people included their currency, I added that in, otherwise I left it as they wrote it. So there are some instances where I wasn’t sure if they had already converted their currency or not
I didn’t ask people if they worked 40 hours, and only a few people specified so that would impact the “value” of some of these salaries (for example, the ROI on a 300k salary is probably less than we think if you’re working 80 hours/week)
I didn’t ask people to separate their base salary from benefits, or whether the salary was net (take home) or gross pay (pre-tax), but I assume that when we speak about salaries, most of us are speaking about gross (as that’s what our job offer says)
Some people included bonuses, which I didn’t include in their “salary” (I made a separate column for that) but that would impact things too
And then finally, I didn’t ask about debt, caretaking/familial financial obligations, rent/mortgage etc. so of course no one is saving their entire take home pay (and if you are, please say more!!)

OK, let’s get into the good stuff ⤵️

How much do you make? Observations, trends, information

243 people shared their salary information
12 countries represented (Germany, Canada, USA, Estonia, Netherlands, UK, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Spain, UAE, Trinidad & Tobago)
66% from the USA
11% from Canada

Salary range I saw, from the lowest 3:

Lowest 3 includes a stay at home mom (stay at home parenting is very much a job so I’m SO happy this person submitted this), a student, and an office job income:

to the highest 3 (all office jobs, well.. does a dentist count as office job?):

POINT 1:

While there is a $400,000 difference between the lowest and highest salaries, the average and the mode tell a much different story.

The average of all 240+ salaries is $115,732. Even more importantly, the mode (ie the number that appears most frequently) is $70,000. There are so many things we could glean from that, but one that stands out to me: we often perceive everyone else to be making exponentially more than us, but in many instances (at least from this dataset), most of us are operating within a similar economy of scale.

Of course everything is relative: maybe you actually ARE being severely underpaid compared to colleagues doing similar jobs. Or maybe you actually are making 20k which would statistically put you below many Americans (in the US, the average salary is 66k)

But, this sharing of hard numbers immediately places us on a spectrum of reality. It takes it out of the theoretical “everyone makes so much more than me" and makes it far more tangible. Sure, there are millionaires and people making high six figures (even just in this small sample size alone), but at least from this data, $70,000 was the number most repeated. There is quite the difference between someone making 200k more than us (which surely does happen) and someone making 20k more than us (maybe just as likely?).

POINT 2:

There are so many other ways people are getting money besides just base salary at one job.

On one end of the spectrum, there were a handful of people who wrote in that they work multiple jobs (one example below):

This could be as a means for survival, or it could be because they want more flexibility, or freedom, or variety in their work (if I were to do a follow-up, I’d want to know more about that). Similarly, multiple people said they made quite a bit of extra income freelancing (in some cases tens of thousands of dollars more), either in addition to their full time job or as a self-employed freelancer full-time:

I want to know more about whether that’s because they eventually want to go full freelance, or whether they just have extra time at their day job etc. but there is definitely a trend in people having multiple streams of income.

POINT 3:

It’s clear that each person prioritizes what is valuable or important to them. To talk simply of raw numbers doesn’t properly elucidate the complex relationship we all have to work and meaning.

There were multiple people who made/are making significant career transitions to make more money

and multiple people who left/are leaving a high paying role for something different (More meaning? ease? enjoyment? Hard to say without interviewing them)

There was also someone with a high-paying job who called out their PTO when considering their benefits:

This is just to say— it seems almost revolutionary to (attempt to, at least) push past the capitalist training of “more money should always be THE driving factor,” to something that is more expansive like “what really matters to me?” Maybe you end up saying ok, I actually do value money. Great- then what are you willing to put up with for more money? And if money is not your motivating factor, how are you going to settle into the fact that you might make significantly less money than others?

ie. How do we determine our Rich Life, to quote Ramit Sethi (can’t recommend his book “I Will Teach You to be Rich” enough!). If you’d like to share what you define as your Rich Life, please leave a comment.

A few more quick hits I noticed from the data:

Age does not always (or often, even?) determine salary. This is one of those things that can be hard to explain to people for whom “rising in the ranks,” (or even just having job security at all…) existed: there is far less linearity or predictability in any of this. People make 300k in jobs with titles that didn’t exist 2 years ago and others work at the same company for 7 years and then one day get laid off. Nothing makes sense, but it’s clear even just from this dataset that age and seniority don’t matter like they used to
Don’t think I need to even state this but the highest paying jobs from this survey are the lawyers, doctors, and business leaders, and the lowest are typically in spheres of education and teaching, non-profit, and government work………….. (when I think about this for more than two seconds, I lose my mind)
And then finally, I had assumed on some level that it would be mostly people with higher salaries that would contribute to this q&a (and to be sure, at least 50% were in the six figure area) but I was so gratified and pleased to see that people of all ranges of salaries, industries and professional levels shared their information. To me, that feels really hopeful. There is an appetite for this conversation, a vulnerability that many are willing to tap into, and a curiosity…a bravery. Not to overstate this tiny survey’s symbolism, but it does feel inspiring and like we’re on our way to collective power, no?!

Where do we go from here?

If you’ve read this far, I imagine you have thoughts. First off, I would love to hear them (and share them if you give me permission). You can comment on this post:

Open in a New Tab

Discussion about this post