The average monthly salary in the Canary Islands, in gross terms, increased by 1.4% in 2020, to 1,775.71, its highest figure since the series began in 2006, although the second lowest in the country, according to the salary decile prepared by the National Institute of Statistics based on data from the Active Population Survey (EPA).
Nationally, the average monthly salary increased by 2.8% last year, to 2,038.6 euros. It is the fourth consecutive year in which the average salary has increased after falling for the first time in ten years in 2016. The increase in 2020 has exceeded that experienced in 2019, when it rose by almost 2%.
The INE specifies that the estimate of the monthly salary for 2020 has taken into consideration the income from temporary employment regulation files (ERTE) in cases where employees were in this situation.
According to Statistics data, 40% of employees (6.44 million) earned between 1,336.6 and 2,295.2 gross euros per month in 2020, while 30% (4.8 million people) earned at least 2,295.2 euros per month and the remaining 30% (another 4.8 million employees) earned a salary of less than 1,336.6 euros per month.
Within those 4.8 million employees who received the lowest salaries, more than 3.2 million earned less than 1,134.1 gross euros per month in their main job, while 1.6 million earned less than 820.19 euros.
To prepare this statistic, the INE orders all employees, 16,103,800 people during the past year, according to the amount of monthly salary received and divides them into 10 equal groups, with 10% of workers in each group.
As a result, the median salary, which divides the total number of workers into two equal parts, those with a higher salary and those with a lower salary, stood at 1,706.4 gross euros per month in 2020, 1.3% more than in 2019 (22.1 euros more). This median salary is 332 euros lower than the average salary for 2020 (2,038.6 euros).
With the advance recorded in 2020, the median salary has chained three consecutive years of increases after having been reduced in the previous three years. In 2014, the median salary was above 1,600 euros per month, but in 2015 the trend was reversed and it was below 1,600 gross euros until 2018, when it began to rebound.
Women, young people and temporary workers concentrate the lowest salaries
Considering the type of working day, 35% of full-time employees earned at least 2,295.2 euros per month in 2020 and 19.9% received less than 1,336.6 euros. On the contrary, 87.1% of part-time employees earned less than 1,336.6 euros per month and only 1.7% earned 2,295.2 euros or more.
The average gross salary of full-time workers reached 2,258.3 euros per month in 2020, almost three times more than part-time employees (800.3 euros), although these differences must take into account the gap in hours worked between both groups.
According to INE data, women, young people, people with a lower level of education, workers with less seniority in companies and those hired temporarily have the lowest salaries.
In women, almost four out of ten received a salary of less than 1,336.6 euros per month, compared to one in five men. Among young people under 25 years of age, the percentage that earns less than 1,336.6 euros per month reaches 61%, a figure that is reduced to 24.6% among employees who are 55 years of age or older. Overall, the average gross salary of young people was 1,207.1 euros per month in 2020, almost half that of those over 55 years of age (2,361.2 euros).
The average female salary was 1,852 euros per month in 2020, above the 1,773.3 euros in 2019, while the average salary of men increased in 2020 to 2,210.3 euros per month. Thus, the average male salary is 19.3% higher than the female salary, a difference that has been reduced by three points compared to 2019, when this gap was 22.5%.
One of the reasons that, according to Statistics, explains the salary differences by sex is that women work in a greater proportion than men in part-time jobs, with temporary contracts, and in lower-paid branches of activity.
There is also a salary gap according to the type of contract. Thus, the average monthly salary of permanent employees (2,187.8 euros in 2020) exceeds that of temporary employees (1,557.8 euros) by 40.4%. 43.9% of employees with temporary contracts earned less than 1,336.6 euros in 2020, compared to 25.6% of permanent employees who were in the same situation.
Among the factors that explain this salary inequality between temporary and permanent employees, the INE mentions the higher educational level of permanent employees and the greater weight of temporary contracts in branches of activity "with a marked seasonal nature" and lower remuneration.
By level of education, the average salary of employees with lower secondary education (1,337.8 euros per month) is considerably lower than that of those with higher education (2,553.2 euros), while, by seniority, those who have been working in a company for ten or more years earn on average 1,100 euros more than those who have been working for less than a year (2,515.6 euros compared to 1,409.1 euros).
The financial and energy sector, the best payers
The lowest salaries were concentrated in 2020 in the hotel and catering industry (68.1% below 1,336.6 euros) and activities of households as employers of domestic staff (67.4%). According to the INE, this is partly due to the greater proportion of part-time jobs and the temporary nature of these sectors.
On the contrary, the highest remunerations were in financial and insurance activities, where 64.8% received salaries above 2,295.2 euros, followed by Education (64.4%) and Public Administration (61.4%).
The lowest average salaries in 2020 were in the activities of households as employers of domestic staff (997.3 gross euros per month), in the hotel and catering industry (1,119.5 euros) and in agriculture (1,373.6 euros), and the highest corresponded to financial and insurance activities (3,152.5 gross euros per month), electricity supply (3,034.1 euros) and information and communications (2,809.5 euros).
Public sector employees earn 58% more
The INE points out that 63.7% of public sector workers had a gross monthly salary of at least 2,295.2 euros in 2020, a percentage that decreases to 21.2% in the case of the private sector.
Statistics underlines that this greater concentration of high salaries in the public sector is due to the higher percentage of employees with higher education, the type of occupation performed, the lower weight of part-time work and greater seniority.
Thus, the average gross salary in the public sector reached 2,884.7 euros per month last year, compared to 1,818.6 euros in the private sector. The former has increased by 4.5% compared to 2019, while the average salary in the private sector grew at a much lower rate, of 1.2%. In comparison, public employees earn on average 58.6% more than private sector employees.
Analyzing the data by region, those with the highest average salaries in 2020 were Madrid (2,350.2 euros), the Basque Country (2,278.8 euros) and Navarra (2,209.2 euros), while Extremadura (1,760.5 euros), Canary Islands (1,775.7 euros) and Andalusia (1,837.3 euros) recorded the lowest.
