Key facts

Overall public sector workforce

  • $95,379 is the median salary of non-casual public sector employees, including executives
  • 18% or $21,773 is the mean (average) pay gap of non-casual public sector employees
  • 10.1% or $10,534 is the median gender pay gap of non-casual public sector employees
  • Overall, more women are employed in each pay group than men, but a higher percentage of men are in the highest pay group than women.
  • The gender pay gap favours men across most occupations and increases with age.

Victorian Public Service (VPS)

  • $105,022 is the median salary of non-casual VPS employees, including executives
  • 6.5% or $7,747 is the mean (average) gender pay gap of non-casual VPS employees
  • 1.8% or $1,914 is the median gender pay gap of non-casual VPS employees
  • The gender pay gap is driven by a higher percentage of men in the highest pay group compared to women.

Gender pay gap by industry

The median gender pay gap varies by industry group.

In 2023, the median gender pay gap:

  • rose to 13.6% from 13% in TAFE and other education industries
  • fell to 13% from 14.5% in 2022 for creative industries, finance, transport and other industries
  • stayed at 10.3% in Government schools
  • rose to 6.7% from 5.6% in public healthcare
  • fell to 4.8% from 5.2% in water and land management
  • rose to 1.8% from 0% in the Victorian Public Service
  • fell to 1.3% from 4.9% in police and emergency services.

Employee pay

How public sector pay is set

There are over 100 enterprise agreements that cover all non-executive employees in the Victorian public sector.

The agreements set employee pay, terms and conditions. They differ based on industry group, employer and occupation.

Agreements are made under the Commonwealth Fair Work Act.

Executive remuneration is set by the Victorian Independent Remuneration Tribunal. See data, facts and visuals on executive remuneration, pay bands and the gender pay gap.

 

 

Pay by gender and the gender pay gap

How we work out the gender pay gap

We use the overall pay gap between women and men as a way to measure workplace gender equality.

We only report the gender pay gap in a binary way (men and women) because the number of employees with self-described gender identity is currently too small to analyse.

We work out the gender pay gap using:

  • mean pay or average pay gap — the lowest and highest salaries have more influence, which increases the pay gap because a small number of men earn very high salaries.
  • median pay or ‘middle’ point of the pay gap — this is less influenced by extreme salaries or outliers and gives us a better idea of the gap for most employees.

This year we’ve included the median and mean pay gap in line with how the Commission for Gender Equality in the Public Sector (CGEPS) reports gender pay gaps.

Our numbers may be different from the CGEPS because we don’t include all organisations in our analysis.

For example, the CGEPS include university employees, local council employees and school employees in their Victorian Public Service analysis.

To work out the median pay gap for the overall public sector workforce we:

  1. Find out what the median full-time equivalent pay is for men ($104,834) and women ($94,300).
  2. Work out the difference between those 2 numbers ($104,834 minus $94,300 equals $10,534).
  3. Express the difference as a percentage of the men’s median salary ($10,534 is 10.1% of men’s median salary of $104,834).
  4. Confirm the median pay gap for the public sector is 10.1%.

 

Distribution of men and women across pay groups

 

Distribution of salary ranges by gender and industry groups

The distribution of men and women across salary ranges varies across industries.

The chart below shows a breakdown of gender distribution across $20,000 salary ranges.

 

Victorian Public Service

 

 

Gender pay gap across VPS pay classification, based on average salary

 

Median gender pay gap by occupation group

 

Median gender pay gap by age group

 

Data sets and how we prepare data

Reviewed 17 May 2024

Published 17 May 2024