Reference

Glossary

Every wage, price, year and change-rate term used across this site, explained in plain language.

Understanding Wage Data

Average Annual Wage: The economy-wide average wage for a calendar year, as reported by the OECD. This site uses it as the headline wage figure on country pages, cards and the comparison page. Because it is an average across all employees, it is not a typical or median wage, and no individual salary should be inferred from it here.
PPP: Purchasing power parity, a conversion that equalises the price of a comparable basket of goods across economies. This site applies PPP before comparing wages, because a raw market exchange rate would distort a wage depending on how expensive each economy is to live in.
PPP-adjusted Wage: A wage converted into a common currency using PPP rather than the market exchange rate. Every wage this site shows is PPP-adjusted, which is why an economy with a small nominal currency wage can still display a comparable value next to the United States.
PPP-adjusted USD: The unit used for every wage value on this site. It expresses how much a domestic wage is worth once price-level differences between economies are removed. It is a comparison unit for reading the tables, not an amount anyone can spend in a shop or bank account.
Nominal Wage: A wage expressed in the local currency of the reporting economy, with no adjustment for price levels or exchange rates. This site never displays nominal wages directly; they appear only after conversion into PPP-adjusted USD, so values stay comparable across all 38 economies.
Real Wage: A wage adjusted for inflation within the same economy, showing how far it stretches against that country's own changing prices. The wage history chart on each country page of this site keeps values in constant prices, so the trend you read there is a real-wage trend.
Constant Prices: Values restated so one base year's price level applies to the whole series, removing domestic inflation. The long-run wage charts on this site rely on constant-price data, which is why a rising line always reflects actual purchasing-power growth over the selected range.
Current Prices: Values expressed in the prices of each observation's own year, unadjusted for later inflation. On this site, current-price figures appear only where a single labelled year is shown; they are never mixed with constant-price series without a label, because they answer different questions.
Latest Common Year: The most recent year in which every compared economy has a reported wage observation. Rankings on this site previously used the latest common year; tables now default to each economy's latest reported wage, and any fallback year is labelled so the two readings are never confused.
Latest Available Year: The newest year with a reported observation for one specific economy, even if other economies report newer data. Country pages on this site show each economy's latest available year beside its wage — a 2025 wage for most economies, or a bracketed earlier year otherwise.
Historical Peak: The highest reported wage value in an economy's full available series. This site shows the peak with its year in the wages table on the Countries page, so you can see how far the latest wage sits below or above the historical high, not only the recent trend.

Understanding Wage Changes

1-Year Change: The percentage change in an economy's wage between the latest reported year and one year earlier. This site shows it in the wages table, signed so a fall is negative. Where either endpoint is missing, the cell shows a dash instead of a partial calculation.
5-Year Change: The percentage change in the wage over a five-year window, comparing the latest reported year with the observation five years before it. This site places it beside the 1-year figure so short-term movement can be read against a medium-run trend without switching tools.
10-Year Change: The percentage change in the wage over a ten-year window. Alongside the 1-year and 5-year columns on this site, it gives a long-run frame that smooths the noise of any single year's reading and shows sustained movement rather than one jump.
Percentage Change: The signed relative change between two values, calculated as the later value divided by the earlier value, minus one, times one hundred. Every change column on this site follows that convention, so a value of -2.50% always means the wage fell by 2.5 per cent.
Growth Index: A series rebased so the first year of the selected range equals 100, with later years showing cumulative growth relative to that base. The wage history chart on this site offers a Growth Index mode, letting economies with very different wage levels be compared by growth shape.
Base Year: The observation whose value is set to 100 when building a growth index. On this site the base year is always the first year inside your selected chart range, so switching the range changes the base; values read as growth since that start, not as wage levels.
Wage Trend: The direction and shape of an economy's wage series over time, read from the history chart rather than any single value. This site keeps reported observations visible, including flat or falling stretches, so a trend describes the data instead of a smoothed forecast.
Missing Year: A year inside a series for which an economy has no reported observation. This site leaves the gap in place: charts break the line and tables show a dash, so a missing year stays visible as missing data instead of being quietly filled with an estimate.

Understanding Price Levels

Price Level Index: A relative measure comparing a category's price level in one economy with the same category in the benchmark economy. Every price value on this site is an index of this kind, which is why it reads as a number around 100 rather than as a currency amount.
Overall Price Level: The aggregate price level across the measured consumption categories, benchmarked to the United States. This site shows it on country pages, in the comparison summary and in price rankings. It is a broad average that can hide large differences between categories.
Category Price Level: The price level index for one specific consumption category such as Food, Clothing or Restaurants. This site lets you switch categories on country pages and sort the price table by any single category, because categories often tell a different story than the overall index.
United States = 100: The benchmark convention used for all price values on this site: the United States price level for the same category and year equals exactly 100. Reading every economy against one fixed reference keeps comparisons consistent across one country view or all 38.
Above Benchmark: A price value higher than 100, meaning the category is more expensive in that economy than in the United States for the same year. Higher Prices rankings on this site use this reading directly; values further above 100 mean a wider gap, not better quality.
Below Benchmark: A price value lower than 100, meaning the category is less expensive than the U.S. reference. Lower Prices rankings on this site surface these economies. A value far below 100 describes a comparatively cheaper category, not automatically a cheaper place to live.
Consumer Price Category: One of the eight spending groups this site organises price data into: Overall, Food, Clothing, Housing, Health, Transport, Recreation and Restaurants. Categories stay separate on every view of this site, because one blended number cannot represent how differently priced each spending area is.
Purchasing Power: How much a given amount of money can buy, which depends on both income and local prices. This site supports purchasing-power reasoning by pairing PPP-adjusted wages with price level indices, so a high wage and a high price level can be seen together.
Cost of Living: The total cost of maintaining a given lifestyle in a place, shaped by prices, taxes, housing and personal choices. This site publishes no single cost-of-living score; it exposes the underlying category indices so a comparison can match your own spending pattern.

Data Handling Terms

Missing Observation: A data point the source does not report for an economy, year or category. This site always shows a missing observation as a dash. It is never drawn as zero and never removed silently, because absence of data and a value of zero are different facts.
Interpolation: Estimating an unreported value by drawing between reported neighbours. This site does not interpolate: where a year or category is missing, the gap stays visible on every page, and lines in the wage history chart follow only the observations that actually exist there.
Backfilling: Substituting an older observation in place of a newer missing one, as if it answered the newer question. This site avoids backfilling: when an economy lacks a 2025 wage, the earlier value is shown, but only with its own year attached in brackets.
Data Coverage: The span of economies, years and categories a dataset actually contains. Coverage on this site is 38 OECD economies, wages from 2000 through 2025, and price indices for 2022 through 2024; anything outside that span does not appear at all.
Observation Year: The calendar year a reported value was actually observed for. Wage and price values on this site always keep their observation year attached, because the two datasets are revised on different publication schedules, and an unlabelled number on its own invites misreading.
Data Source: The named provider and dataset a value comes from. All wage and price figures on this site come from OECD statistical datasets, listed with provider, dataset, official link, coverage years and review date in the Data Guide’s Data Sources section, so any value can be traced.
Data Reviewed: The label stating when the underlying data was last checked against its source. On this site it appears as "Data reviewed" on pages and in the footer. It marks a verification pass on the imported data, not the publication date of the page.
OECD Economy: One of the 38 member economies of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development whose data this site presents. The country list, maps, tables and rankings on this site cover exactly these economies; countries outside the OECD are outside this site's coverage.

Data reviewed: August 2026