Australia’s retail industry has recorded the fifth largest month-on-month increase in wages in September 2023, up 7.5%.
This is according to new data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which noted that the six highest increases are from industries where periodic bonuses are more common in September.
This includes information media and telecommunications (up 16.9%), electricity, gas, water and waste services (up 13.5%), financial and insurance services (up 13.4%), mining (up 12.5%), retail trade (up 7.5%) and transport, postal and warehousing (up 7.2%).
The new ABS figures come from a new experimental measure of aggregate wages and salaries from Single Touch Payroll data, called the Monthly Employee Earnings Indicator.
“Today’s release offers monthly insights over the last six months, from April 2023 through to September 2023, and follows the initial release of figures for April in the middle of the year,” ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said.
“In September 2023, employees were paid around $99.6 billion in wages and salaries. September is a seasonal peak in earnings when periodic bonuses are paid in a range of industries.
“These new figures show us that wages and salaries paid by employers rose by around 3.8%, or $3.7 billion, from August to September, and were 8.4%, or $7.7 billion, higher than September 2022.
“As with all aggregate measures of total wages and salaries, today’s data reflects a combination of underlying wage growth, the increase in employment reported in other ABS measures, and other compositional changes such as hours worked and periodic payments.”
While these components are all currently combined, the ABS is exploring the future separation of periodic payments like bonuses and overtime.