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How many of your 100 neighbors do you think earn more than 100,000 a month?
Explore real salary distribution in Russia by profession and demographics, debunking myths about averages and income inequality.
Key Takeaways
- Median salary better represents typical income than average salary due to outliers.
- A large portion of the workforce is not captured in official salary statistics.
- Unemployment rates are lower when considering the entire population.
- Significant income disparities exist by profession, gender, and industry.
- Understanding real salary data empowers better career and financial decisions.
What the video covers
- The video analyzes Russian salary data from Rosstat for 2025, illustrating income distribution using a 100-apartment building metaphor.
- It explains the difference between average and median salaries, highlighting how a few high earners skew averages.
- Only 38% of working Russians are covered by official salary data, excluding many self-employed and informal workers.
- The video discusses discrepancies in salary reports due to different data sources, such as job vacancies versus actual payments.
- Unemployment is lower than commonly perceived when calculated against the entire population, not just the labor force.
- Pensioners earn on average close to the minimum wage, revealing economic challenges for retirees.
- Gender pay gaps and profession-based salary differences are explored, with examples like welders earning more than some IT roles.
- The highest earners work in finance, insurance, and oil and gas sectors, with some individuals earning millions monthly.
- The video encourages viewers to check their profession’s salary data to negotiate raises or consider job changes.
- It concludes by addressing income inequality and the psychological impact of comparing oneself to neighbors.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and salary perception in Russia
- 01:27Average vs median salary explained
- 02:52Data coverage and limitations
- 04:21Salary discrepancies by data source
- 05:34Unemployment and non-working population
- 06:52Pensioners and income challenges
- 08:12Salary differences by profession and gender
- 10:59Top earners and industry analysis
- 16:37Summary and implications for viewers
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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According to Rosstat data for 2025, the average salary in Russia is 101,784 rubles. I bet you just compared these figures to your own salary and wanted to say it’s a lie. And that only some kind of elites get such salaries.
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That’s normal. We don't know how to evaluate ourselves in a vacuum. We need someone nearby to understand if we're doing well or not. That's why people often don't just want a better car; they want a car better than their
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neighbor's. The catch is that your neighbor will never tell you the truth about their income. If they earn little, they'll surely exaggerate, and if they earn a lot, they'll stay silent because grandma told them since childhood that money loves silence. I
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took the income data for people in Russia and built a 100-apartment building, 10 floors, where 10% of the residents of our vast homeland live on each floor. Then I settled all 100 people on these floors based on their income size. I accounted for salaries,
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pensions, benefits, and generally all money that can be analyzed in any way. At the bottom live those who earn the least, and at the top are the wealthiest. In short, I moved all our country's citizens into this house, and
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for the next 20 minutes, I’ll tell you how much every one of your neighbors actually earns. Why do men earn significantly more than women? Is that even true? Why is the tenth floor so different from the rest? What kind
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of people live there? What do they do for a living? What should you do to earn that kind of money? What exactly is this thing anyway? You’ll find out your average salary and a bunch of other interesting things if you watch
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this video to the end. Let’s go. Before going upstairs, let’s return to the question I asked you at the very beginning. How many of your 100 neighbors do you think get more than 100,000 rubles per month? 16 people. If
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you said a different number, that’s normal. Almost everyone does. The one to blame is that very average salary we started with. What exactly is this average salary? Let’s take our building, add up the salaries of everyone living in it, and divide by
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the number of those people. It seems like that is the right thing to do. It is mathematically correct, and logically it seems so too. The key word here is "seems." Everything is ruined by the neighbor living at the very top
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with a salary of 3 million rubles a month. And his apartment in these calculations pulls the average building salary up stronger than the first four floors combined. That is why Rosstat also calculates a second figure, the so-called median. This is the salary of
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the person who stands exactly in the middle of our sample. That is, half of the working population earns less than that, and half earns more. In this scenario, a neighbor with 3 million has no effect on the median. He is simply
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one of those ten who ended up at the top. Let’s take April of last year as an example. The average salary was 99,400, the median was 73,900. There is a 25,000 difference between them. And when the news says that salaries have
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grown, they are almost always referring to the first figure. By the way, the exact same trick with the average applies to investments as well. Average yield there lies in the exact same way and for the exact same reason. I
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usually analyze things like this on Boosty; the link is in the description. The second point is about the figures themselves. The salary study I used for the data in this video covers 28 million working Russians. You might think there are significantly more
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working people in Russia, and you would be right, there are nearly 75 million. This means I only have exact salary data for 38% of working Russians. 46 million people remain outside of this scope. This includes micro-businesses, individual entrepreneurs, and everyone
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working off the books. I tried to find some reliable data on these people. It is not very clear how representative they are. For instance, in July of this year, 1.7 million self-employed individuals issued checks totaling 299 billion rubles. That comes to 17,500
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per month. Not only is this half the minimum wage, but even if you assume a third of the self-employed accounts are "dormant" and divide only by the active ones, it comes to 25,000. And that is still lower, not to mention that this
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is revenue, while profit is likely even smaller. This is not the only problem. Rosstat also has a second average national salary, one that counts employees not just in organizations, but also at micro-enterprises and for private individuals. In 2023, it was
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57,000 versus 75,000 for organizations. At the same time, the gap between these two methodologies is growing every year. Therefore, there is absolutely no understanding of how to weave this data into a single concept. And I will count
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only people who work in organizations, as they make up the overwhelming majority. Third. You have surely seen headlines where some publications calculate the salary for a specific profession, and it is twice as high or twice as low as what Rosstat reports.
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This is also normal. The difference lies in the calculation methods. For example, they calculate data from job vacancies. This means they consider not what the employer pays the employee, but what they promise to pay. Do I need to explain which of these figures will
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be higher? I think it is already obvious to you. Rosstat, however, calculates accruals, which is what all these working people actually received on their cards. By the way, it is also very important for you personally to know what kind of salary people in your
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specific profession are making. Especially if you have been stuck in the same position for a long time.
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There is a high probability that the market has already moved ahead in terms of pay, while your salary hasn't grown at all. If you want to check the numbers for your specific profession, I posted the data I used for this video
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on Telegram, along with instructions on how to use it, simple enough for anyone. With this data, you can, for example, have a reasoned conversation with your boss about a raise or decide to change jobs. A very useful tool. The lower
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floors. The first and second floors, meaning 20 out of 100 people earn nothing at all. Children live here, there is nothing wrong with that. It just means every fifth resident of our country is not yet working. And this is
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the only zero in this video that is actually good news. The third floor. Here is where the children and adults without their own income end. And here lives the person you are most afraid of becoming. This is the unemployed person.
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We have one of them for the whole building. Those who are in the know might get indignant now, since official unemployment according to Rosstat is 2.2%, yet I only have one unemployed person out of 100 in my building. So,
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I'm a propagandist and a sellout. I applaud your attention to detail, but there is no mistake here. I spent a long time trying to understand how they calculate unemployment. And I emphasize, it seems that 2.2% is not calculated
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from the entire country, but only from those who are working or looking for work. We have 1,674,000 such unemployed individuals. And if you count based on the entire population of the country, for our building that comes out to just
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over 1%. 1.674 is, by the way, practically a historic low. A month earlier in February, it was 2.1%, which is the lowest level since 1991. The fear of being left without a job affects the whole building, and me
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personally, to be honest; it is one of the most unwanted fears, yet unemployment itself, based on the data, practically doesn't exist. Let's mark this apartment. We will return to it at the very end when we analyze the gap
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between the rich and the poor. Next, we have 23 consecutive apartments occupied by people who have already finished their working years. These are pensioners. The average old-age pension for a non-working pensioner is 27,850 rubles.
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27,093. The difference is only 757 rubles. And it turns out that the average pension in the country is almost equal to the minimum wage in that same country. That cannot help but be saddening. I have already mentioned many times in my videos that if you are
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under 30 today, you shouldn't seriously count on a state pension. I cannot say that it won't exist, but in its current interpretation, you won't have one. For sure. Your task today is to take care of your pension yourself. Even if
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everything goes great and you receive a large state pension in your old age, the extra savings you build up throughout your life will definitely not be a waste. We’ve already gone through half the building, and I haven’t mentioned a single salary yet
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. 50 out of every 100 people don't live on a salary. Now starts the part you turned this video on for. The fifth floor. Somewhere around here, right among the pensioners, the first people with salaries appear. And their salary
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is lower than the pension of their neighbors on the floor. This is what’s called part-time employment.
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According to Rosstat, 2.6 million workers earn below the minimum wage. No one knows for sure how many people that is across the whole country. An estimate suggests about 2 million people, with another 4.5 million sitting right at the minimum wage level
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. This is an absolutely normal story. I worked under such a scheme myself from age 17 to 19. The employer hires you on a part-time basis—not a full 1.0 stake, but say 0.2. In that case, legally, you should work 20%of the
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hours and receive 20%of the salary. By the way, this is a very popular hiring scheme for full-time students. Clearly, employers sometimes force these employees to work full-time for peanuts . I was forced to do it too, by the way
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. They are scoundrels. We condemn that and do not approve of it. And the state is ready to protect you if you report it to the right place. But that’s life, unfortunately, and one must fight against it. I’ll also say a few words
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about the minimum wage itself. It’s a separate story that almost no one knows about. It is tied to the median by law and cannot be lower than 48%of the median salary. The median, not the average. Write in the comments why it
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was done that way. To be honest, I truly don't understand why. Now, calculate it with me. If the minimum wage is 27,000 rubles......and that’s 48%of the median, then the median is about 56,000. In the previous section, I mentioned 73,900. Both figures are
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called the median, and both are from Rosstat. The difference is, once again, the sampling. In one case, we count everyone including small businesses, and in the other, we don't. That’s just how your statistics work. The sixth floor is from 17,000 to 44,000.
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Who lives here? Here we have janitors, cleaners, cashiers, security guards, and merchandisers. Vacancies for them offer between 33,000 and 48,000 rubles.
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The seventh floor is up to 64,000, and the eighth is up to 89,000. And we should stop and look at the eighth floor in more detail. Here we find two entire industries at once. The lowest-paid sector in the country is
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hotels and catering. 66,000. Right behind it is education at 71,344 rubles . And here lives the person because of whom I released this video 2 days later than planned, because I recalculated it about 10 times. This is a school
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teacher. The official salary of a school teacher is 71,440 rubles. This is almost the middle among all working people, and it seems to sound cool, you must agree. But only until you open the footnote under the table. This figure
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is calculated without the extra pay for being a homeroom teacher. With it, it comes to about 76,000. And it comes not from one workload, but from one and a half to double plus the homeroom pay.
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That is, the teacher and their salary stay on the eighth floor not by one job , but essentially by three jobs inside one position. Statistics do not account for this. Alas, it only sees the amount on the pay stub. This was the most
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difficult question I had to solve for this video. I am not a teacher, and there are no teachers in my circle.
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Therefore, write in the comments whether I understood all of this correctly, how much teachers really earn. I have a narrative in my head that the situation in the regions seems significantly sadder in this profession , but I am not asserting anything.
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Ninth floor. Blue-collar trades from 89,000 to 136,000 rubles. Here we are already stepping over the coveted hundred grand, and 80 neighbors are behind us. Now a question for you. What is the highest-paid profession in Russia this year? As an IT guy, I would
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tell you that it's an IT guy. We do earn quite well, I won't hide it. It turns out it's a welder. 267,300 rubles . per month. For comparison, I will take not the average IT guy, but the most expensive role in IT from the same
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sample of the same month. It's a Data Scientist. It's a bit less there, only 250,000. DevOps engineer 216,800. The welder overtakes both of them. And it's unclear why every second video has ads for Data Science courses, and not for
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welders. If you were looking for some kind of gig for yourself, I've found it for you, go and learn to be a welder.
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It is important to clarify here that the comparison is as honest as possible . That is, I am taking data from one site for one month, calculated using one methodology. You could take a welder from this year and an IT guy
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from last year, and it would look nicer in favor of the IT guy. But that would be manipulating statistics. We don't respect that. The remaining blue-collar trades in descending order are on your screen. Pause it and read. Almost this
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entire list lives on the ninth floor and above. But one shouldn't be deceived here either. The median for blue-collar trades overall is 81,000.
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And that is, after all, the eighth floor, which is two floors lower. You also need to understand that the list includes the best vacancies, while the profession lives as a whole in its entire mass. A welder in the capital
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and a welder in a town of 20,000 residents are two completely different professions in terms of income, and they will be on different floors. There is also a separate story that lifts a person to the top floors, even without
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a higher education—this is shift work . The median for shift workers this summer is 170,000; this is the highest level of offers among all work formats in the country. A welder on shift work is exactly the case where the salary
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offer goes significantly higher than the median. There is no exact figure for a month-on/month-off schedule in open data, but the benchmark is plus or minus 213,600. That is cool, but I assume it is backbreaking labor far from civilization. It is likely 12-hour
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shifts, a month without days off, and half a year without family. A person on shift work pays exactly this price for being on the top floors. Whether it is worth it or not is for you to decide.
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It seems to me that in one's youth, when there is no family or children yet , perhaps it is worth it. Moving on. We are still on the ninth floor, and here we have the most hyped job in the
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country. You can ask a search engine about IT salaries, and you will find diametrically opposite data. 182,700 is the median from Habr Career. There, questionnaires are filled out by practicing developers who wanted to share their salary themselves. As far
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as I understand, it also includes the incomes of analysts, testers, and technical writers. These are people whose work is incredibly important for our profession, but they receive a significantly lower salary than technical specialists. 88,600 is the average salary offered across all
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vacancies labeled as IT. Everyone is included there, meaning tech support and people who can just fix a printer will be in this sample. Essentially, both numbers are true. It is just that one describes a person from the tenth
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floor, and the second describes a person from the ninth floor. The phrase "IT salary" by itself, without clarifying who exactly was counted, does not make much sense. If you look at the industry as a whole based on actual accruals, the "Information and
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Communications" section, which includes IT workers, yields 184,400 rubles. Which is similar to the data I showed you above. Moving on. The second place in the country among all industries, what would you think—it is the production of tobacco products. 207,994
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rubles on average. It turns out that 4 years of technical university, 2 years of pet projects, a year of hackathons, and a seven-stage interview lose out to tobacco production in money. Now about those who are actually paid well in IT.
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Data Scientists are at 250,000 and DevOps engineers are at 216,800. The tenth floor in both cases. It is important for me to tell you one thing here, because I work in development myself. IT actually looks like a golden
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industry only from a top-down projection. A junior who sends out resumes after a course for 80,000 doesn't live on the tenth floor and is often below the fifth. And frankly, nobody wants these juniors today, even for free, to tell you the truth.
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Although you can still get hired. You just have to lie that you aren't a junior, but a mid. You can find tons of information online about how to do that correctly. The tenth floor. 90 neighbors are already behind us. Only
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the wealthiest are left, those who reached this level by industry. First is finance and insurance, and oil and gas extraction. 216 and 219,000. Oil and gas beats finance by 2,000 rubles.
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and becomes the highest-paid industry in the country. Now, geography. Name the region with the highest salary in the country. Alas, it's not Moscow, it's Chukotka, at 217,182 rubles. Then we have the Magadan Region, 181,790.
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and 12 rubles. less puts Moscow in third place. The top of the geographical rating is the North with its bonuses and shift work I mentioned a few minutes ago. On the other side of the list, we have Ingushetia. That's
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44,400 rubles. And the difference with Chukotka comes out to almost five times . In fairness, I'll note that in Chukotka, a carton of milk costs significantly more; salary and standard of living are completely different things. This specific video is strictly
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about salary. Now about the floor itself. Remember, I said at the beginning that it's not like all the others. Entry here starts from 136,000 rubles. And there is no ceiling at all.
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On the sixth floor, the difference between the poorest and richest residents is 27,000 rubles. On the tenth floor, it can be counted in the tens of millions. One neighbor might earn 185,000, another 3 million, and a third even 30. But formally, they are
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all in one group due to their small numbers. How many people live at the very top? 45,428. people across the country earn more than 1 million rubles . in a single calendar month. That's 0.16. Of those surveyed by Rosstat, of
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all employed in the country it's 0.06, and of the entire population, it's 0.03 . Of these, 34,000 earn from 1 to 2 million, 5,000 from 2 to 3, and 5,300 more than 3 million a month. In our 100
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-apartment building, such a neighbor doesn't exist at all. To meet at least one, you need to visit 32 such buildings. Now guess where this neighbor works. Most of them are in information and communications. 9,900 people. These are most likely
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management positions. Then comes trade, also, most likely in managerial positions. Then the manufacturing industry and finance. Now for the most interesting part. Let's take only those who earn a salary and compare the top 10%of workers with the bottom 10%. The
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difference comes out to 12.7 times. And this, by the way, is the lowest in the last 25 years. In 2000, the gap was almost 30 times larger. And it seems like good news that the gap is narrowing. But let's try to understand
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what caused these changes. Mathematically, the gap can be reduced in two ways. We can either raise the bottom or lower the top. What happened here was the former. It seems to me that we simply started running out of
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manual laborers who were previously at the bottom. Because of welders and everyone else like them, factories started throwing money around. Because of this, the lower floors moved up faster than the upper floors did. In other words, inequality isn't shrinking
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because the poor got rich, but because the sought-after portion of the poor became scarce, forcing higher pay for their work. Well, globally, this means the poor have indeed become wealthier, just through a non-obvious mechanism.
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But this only covers the gap in the top half of the house among those who work.
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If we count not just wages, but the income of all residents including pensions, benefits, and dependents, things get more interesting. Rosstat has a specific indicator for this, called the fund ratio. In 2023, it was 14.8, and in 2024, it was 15.1. This
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coefficient is calculated as the ratio of the cash income of the 10%most affluent to the 10%least affluent of the population. The gap specifically between workers is shrinking, but the gap between people as a whole is growing. This is great news for anyone
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who is currently, in quotes, "at the machine." And not quite so great for those who still, for some reason, think the world is fair. With your permission , I'll take a quick look at the labor market agenda. I love doing that,
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unfortunately. I can't help myself. Once every two years, Rosstat asks organizations about wages separately for men and women. Our latest data is from October 2023. Men: 117,000, and women: 79,000. A difference of 67%. Two years ago, this difference was 69.5%.
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In rubles, our gap grew from 26,000 to 38,000. And the same study includes hourly pay. The difference there is 637 rubles. For men, and 448 for women.
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Broken down by hourly pay, it's 70% instead of 67%. The difference between these two percentage figures is the portion of the gap explained by the number of hours worked, which is higher for men. That's how things stand. Now
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you know which floor you live on and how much each of your neighbors earns.
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And here are three things you should take away from this video. First, your floor—in other words, your income— is determined not so much by effort, but by your industry, region, and whether you are in high demand. The gap
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between the education sector and oil and gas is threefold, and absolutely no amount of your productivity or efficiency will bridge this divide.
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Second, the fastest climb in this house right now is for those who were discouraged from going to trade school; welders today make more than data scientists. Third. In absolutely any field, you can rake in crazy money. You just need to realize that you need to
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do something different, and then figure out exactly what that is. For example, if you're a student, you likely know popular tutor-bloggers who create their own online schools, courses, and so on.
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Overall, it’s just a teacher who realized how to rake in money in their field. Such non-obvious mechanics exist in absolutely any profession. This entire house was assembled from open data from Rosstat, Esfera, the Federal Tax Service, and the pension fund. I
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really put a lot of work into this. My editor almost ended up in a mental ward , too. Hit the like button, subscribe, be good people. Otherwise, what's the deal with that. Follow the Telegram channel, subscribe to Boosty. Earn more
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, spend less. And see you in the next videos.
Topics:Russia salariesincome distributionmedian vs average salaryRosstat datasalary by professionunemployment Russiapension incomegender pay gapincome inequalitycareer advice
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