Employee pay and gender pay

How to read this page

Unless stated otherwise, this workforce data shows you numbers as at June 2020.

For most visuals, we give you a break down in 3 ways:

Victorian Public Service (VPS): the 8 departments and 43 authorities and offices defined to be public service employers under the Public Administration Act 2004
Public entities: all other public sector bodies outside the VPS that have a public function
Overall public sector workforce: public entities and VPS combined

At the end of this page, find Excel datasets for June 2015 to June 2020.

Read more about how we define the public sector or see the full list of public sector agencies.

Get the data set on:

Remuneration

Key facts

$88,272 is the median salary of non-casual public sector employees
$95,549 is the median salary of non-casual Victorian Public Service employees
10.7% is the gender pay gap of non-casual public sector employees
4.3% is the gender pay gap of non-casual public service employees

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How public sector pay is set

There are over 145 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.

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Median annual salary of non-casual employees by industry group

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Distribution of non-casual employees by salary range and industry group

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Pay by gender

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

How we measure the pay gap

Using the overall public sector workforce as an example, this is how we measure the pay gap:

find out what the median full-time equivalent pay is for men ($97,744) and women ($87,282)
work out the difference between those 2 numbers ($97,744 minus $87,282 equals $10,462)
express the difference as a percentage of the men’s median salary ($10,462 is 10.7% of men’s median salary of $97,744)

So the pay gap for the public sector is 10.7%.

Median salaries

Overall public sector workforce

Median salary: $88,272
Men’s median salary: $97,744
Women’s median salary: $87,282
Pay gap 10.7% or $10,462

Victorian Public Service

All median salary: $95,549
Men’s median salary: $99,433
Women’s median salary: $95,192
Pay gap 4.3% or $4,241

Distribution of men and women across pay quartiles for overall public sector workforce

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The pay gap is a result of the distribution of women and men across pay bands and roles.

Pay quartile 1 is employees with salaries up to $70,578, made up of roles mostly filled by women such as:

administrative and caring
junior clerical

Pay quartile 4 shows employees with salaries of $106,147 and above, made up of roles with more men than women, such as:

professional roles
managerial roles

Victorian Public Service

Like the overall public sector workforce, women are more likely than men to work in occupations classified at the lower half of the pay range.

Gender pay gap across Victorian Public Service pay classification, based on average salary

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The pay gap at classifications 4, 5 and 6 has gone up.

This is because from 1 July 2019, VicRoads and Public Transport Victoria transferred into the Department of Transport and now use the Victorian Public Service pay classifications.

Former VicRoads employees retained the same pay entitlement as their previous enterprise agreement.

This entitlement has a higher maximum pay range than the equivalent Victorian Public Service pay classifications.

More men than women transferred at Victorian Public Service classifications 4, 5 and 6.

This meant the overall average salary for men went up more than the overall average salary for women at these classifications.

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Data set

For the most up to date data on employee pay and gender pay, see our most recent release: 2021 employee pay and gender pay

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