Median salary in Russia: what it is and how much half of workers earn
Median salary in Russia in April 2025 was 73,871 rubles. Half of workers earned less than this amount, half more. The average salary for the same month was 99,399 rubles, so the median is lower by 25.5 thousand, about a quarter. And most often people were credited about 51 thousand. These are Rosstat data from a sample survey of organisations, amounts before personal income tax deduction.
Below we explain the difference between median and average with a simple example, show the median by years, regions and industries. All figures can be opened on interactive charts.
What is median salary in simple terms
Line up all workers in the country in a queue by salary size, from the smallest to the largest. The person exactly in the middle of this queue receives the median salary. Half of the workers are before them, the other half are after them.
The average is calculated differently: you add up all salaries and divide by the number of people. Take a company where nine employees earn 50 thousand each, and the director earns a million. The average for the company will be 145 thousand, even though nobody except the director earns that much. The median will remain 50 thousand, and it more accurately tells how much a typical employee is paid.
There is also a third measure, the modal salary. This is the most frequent amount: more people receive it than any other amount.
| Indicator, April | 2019 | 2021 | 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average salary | 47,657 | 56,280 | 72,490 | 99,399 |
| Median salary | 34,335 | 40,245 | 52,558 | 73,871 |
| Modal salary | 23,510 | 27,639 | 35,514 | 50,994 |
Rubles per month, organizations without small business entities.
The order is the same for all years: mode is lower than median, median is lower than average. This is what a distribution with a long right tail looks like. Most receive moderate amounts, a small group receives very high amounts, and this group pulls the average upward.
Open interactive chart of average, median and modal salary →
Median salary in Russia by year
Rosstat calculates the median once every two years, in odd years, and only for April. A separate sample survey of organisations is carried out for this purpose. Therefore the series is short: five points since 2017.
| Year | Median salary, rub. | Median as % of average |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 28,345 | 72.9 |
| 2019 | 34,335 | 72.1 |
| 2021 | 40,245 | 71.5 |
| 2023 | 52,558 | 72.5 |
| 2025 | 73,871 | 74.3 |
Over eight years the median grew by 2.6 times. The strongest increase was in the last period: from 2023 to 2025 by 40.6%, while the average for April rose by 37.1%. The median grew faster than the average, and its share of the average rose to 74.3%. This is the maximum for all years of observation. In simple terms, the salary of a typical worker in the last two years caught up with the average rather than lagged behind it.
The same is visible from another angle. The share of workers whose wages were below the subsistence minimum for the working‑age population was 13.1% in 2011, 7.3% in 2017, and 2.3% in 2025. View series by years and regions →
Why the median is lower than the average: how the wage fund is divided
The difference between the median and the average is created by high wages at the top. Rosstat divides all employees into five equal groups of 20% and looks at what share of the total wage fund each receives.
In April 2025, the fifth of workers with the highest wages received 46.8% of all accrued money. The fifth with the lowest received 6.3%. The average wage in the top group was 233,195 rubles, in the bottom 31,146, a difference of 7.5 times. And the average wage in the third, middle group was 74,143 rubles, almost exactly the median.
Wage inequality is gradually decreasing. The share of the top group in the wage fund in 2019 was 48.2%, the Gini coefficient for wages 0.41. In 2025 it fell to 0.397. The average wage of the top 10% of earners was 12.7 times higher than that of the bottom 10%. Open the distribution of the wage fund by groups → How overall income inequality changes is shown in the summary "Gini coefficient by years".
Median salary by region
The spread between regions is more than fivefold. The highest median is in Chukotka, 171,835 rubles, the lowest in Ingushetia, 31,418.
The top seven are almost entirely northern and resource‑based: besides Chukotka, there is the Yamalo‑Nenets Autonomous Okrug (142,990), Magadan Oblast (130,724), Nenets Autonomous Okrug (125,179), Sakhalin (120,477) and Yugra (115,106). Moscow ranks fourth with 128,429 rubles. At the bottom of the list are the republics of the North Caucasus and Kalmykia.
The median for Russia is higher than in most regions. Of the 83 subjects for which data are available, it exceeds the regional median in only 21, and in 37 the median is below 60 thousand. There is no contradiction: the all‑Russia median is calculated across all workers at once, and many people work in regions with high wages, in Moscow, the Moscow region (90,768) and St. Petersburg (99,944).
It is interesting to see how the median lags behind the average within a region. The biggest gap is in Moscow: the median there is only 72.1% of the average, the lowest value among regions. The smallest gap is in Chukotka (88.7%), Yugra (88.1%) and the Yamal (87.5%): high wages there are distributed more evenly. View median salary for all regions →
The average salary by region is convenient to compare in the regional salary ranking, and for the capital there is a separate page "Average salary in Moscow".
Median salary by industry
The highest median is in mining of mineral resources, 127,601 rubles. Close behind are information and communication (125,574), finance and insurance (118,281), construction (112,077). The lowest are education (50,497), culture and sports (51,885) and health care (56,129).
The ratio of the median to the average by industry shows how misleading the average figure can be. In information and communication the median is 65.9% of the average, in finance 65.2%, in other services 63.1%. In these sectors there is a small group of very high salaries, and the industry average considerably overstates what a typical employee earns. In mining (86.3%) and construction (85.0%) the gap is small.
The fastest growth is among builders: the median rose from 2023 to 2025 from 72,596 to 112,077 rubles, an increase of 54%. Open median salary by industry → Average salaries by industry for the full year are discussed in the article "Average salary by industry".
Questions and Answers
What is the median salary in Russia in 2025?
73,871 rubles per month for April 2025, gross. This is the latest figure: the survey is carried out every two years.
How much is that net?
After deducting 13% personal income tax, about 64.3 thousand rubles remain. The annual income at the median level does not reach the threshold at which a higher rate applies.
Which better shows what people earn: the average or the median salary?
The median. It does not react to the very high salaries at the top and answers the question “how much does a typical worker earn”. The average is needed for something else: it shows how much total money is paid to workers per person.
Why does the median differ so much from the average salary for 2025?
The average for the whole of 2025, according to Rosstat, is 101,784 rubles (summary by years). It is higher than the median for two reasons. First, it is the mean of all salaries, which is pulled up by high earnings. Second, the annual figure includes December bonuses, while the median is calculated for April.
Why are there no data for 2024 and 2026?
Rosstat conducts the survey of organizations on salary distribution in odd years and only for April. There are no interim estimates of the median.
In Brief
- Median salary in Russia in April 2025: 73,871 rubles. Half of workers earn less.
- Average for the same month 99,399 rubles, modal 50,994. The median is 74.3% of the average, the highest since 2017.
- From 2017 to 2025 the median grew by 2.6 times.
- One fifth of the highest‑paid earn 46.8% of the total wage fund.
- The highest median is in Chukotka (171,835), the lowest in Ingushetia (31,418). Moscow has the largest gap between median and average.