SSB: The average monthly salary in Norway increased by 4.2% last year

The average monthly salary in Norway increased by 4.2% from 2020 to 2021. The increase is high and is largely due to delayed wage settlements.

The increase is almost double the growth in 2020, when it was 2.2%, Statistics Norway (SSB) states. Wage growth was also higher than in 2019, when it was the highest in many years.

The average monthly salary per full-time equivalent in November 2021 was NOK 50,790. The increase from November the year before was about NOK 2,000.

Two reasons

Senior adviser Håkon Grini at Statistics Norway points out that there are two important explanations for wage growth over the past year. First, there were a record number of vacancies in the autumn of 2021, which may have given employers incentives to offer higher wages. Secondly, delayed wage settlements from 2020 have been included in the statistics for 2021.

“Due to the lockdown in 2020, many of the wage settlements were postponed. This means that some of the wage growth that would normally have come in 2020 did not come until the following year. We should therefore see the development over a longer period,” Håkon Grini said.

“If we look at 2020 and 2021 in context, wage growth does not differ much from previous years,” he added.

Mostly in municipal administration

Wage developments picked up in all sectors. The local government had the strongest growth, with 4.4%, but this was only 0.1% more than for the central government.

There has been high growth in bonus payments in the private sector. From 2020 to 2021, the average bonus per month increased by 17.1%. In comparison, bonuses in the private sector increased by 4.8% the year before.

“A contributing reason for the increase may be that many bonuses were withheld in 2020 due to uncertainty related to the pandemic. Some of these may instead have been paid out in 2021 when it was seen that the consequences of the pandemic were less than feared,” the senior adviser at Statistics Norway said.

Source : NTB Scanpix / #Norway Today / #NorwayTodayFinance

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