Are you sick of living in the United States? Has being holed up in your apartment for the pandemic made you want to get as far from it as humanly possible—as in boarding a boat or plane, traveling across an ocean and a few continents, then staying indefinitely?
That may be a common escapist fantasy, but the most seriously committed know it involves actual logistics research. First you need a job, but you also need to know what that job will buy you. You could be pairing coconut milk with caviar on the balcony of your beach-side tower, or scraping together coins for microwaveable beans in your basement sublet (like, well, lots of people must). It all depends on the money.
Lucky for you, this salary calculator might help. Developed by William Russell, an expat insurance firm, it lets you see the average yearly pay for your specific profession in each of 38 countries. Data for the countries were drawn from the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, headquartered in Paris), and all global currencies were converted into Euros and U.S. dollars. Any hourly salaries were adjusted for a 37.5-hour workweek.
The tool includes a variety of jobs, such as web developer, data analyst, graphic designer, journalist, firefighter, librarian, barista, and others.
At a glance, the highest average salaries came from Switzerland, Norway, Denmark, and Japan, with totals ranging from $59,000 to $93,000 per year. However, many of those same countries topped the OECD’s index for cost of living, too. Meanwhile, the lowest salaries were in Turkey, Colombia, Mexico, Hungary, and Greece, which ranged from $6,000 to $15,000 per year. The first three were also the three lowest cost-of-living countries.
The United States had the second highest average salary, and seventh highest cost of living.
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