Cyprus’s average wage is up 35% since 2010. The typical wage buys just 5% more, with most workers earning less than the average.

Two ways to describe a normal wage

The headline figure is an average, and most people earn less than it.

There are two common ways to sum up what people earn. The average, which statisticians call the mean, adds up everyone's pay and divides by the number of people. The median lines everyone up from lowest-paid to highest-paid and takes the person in the middle.

If pay were spread evenly, the two would be close. In Cyprus they are €638 apart. A fairly small group earns far more than everyone else, and their pay lifts the average without moving the person in the middle. So the average overstates what a typical job pays, and the median is the better guide to it.

One average, many different jobs

Average pay ranges from under €1,000 a month in farming to over €4,700 in finance.

Part of the reason one number can't describe a Cypriot salary is that the economy is really several labour markets side by side. In 2024 average pay in finance and insurance was €4,710 a month, and in information and communications, which is mostly tech, €4,217. In hotels and restaurants it was €1,583, and in farming €941.

The best-paid sectors are not where most people work. Wholesale and retail is the biggest employer, with one job in six, and pays €1,781 on average. Construction, hotels and restaurants, and manufacturing are all large and all below the national average. Among the big employers, only the public sector and professional services, such as law and accounting firms, combine size with above-average pay. In total, about two jobs in three are in sectors whose average pay is below the national figure.

Average gross monthly earnings by sector, 2024 (CyStat), and each sector's share of jobs, 2024 (CyStat Labour Force Survey). Job shares leave out domestic workers in private households, whom the pay figures don't cover. The sectors shown account for nine jobs in ten. Pay figures count employees; job shares count everyone in work, including the self-employed.

The average keeps pulling away

Since 2015 the gap has widened from 23% to 33% of the median.

The gap between the average and the median isn't new, but it has grown. In 2010 the average was about €355 a month higher than the median. By 2025 the difference was €638. Measured against the median, it went from 23% to 33%.

It didn't grow evenly. Through the banking crisis and the austerity that followed, both figures fell and the gap stayed at about 23%. From 2015 it widened steadily, levelled off between 2018 and 2021, jumped again in 2022 and 2023, and has edged up since.

Average and median gross monthly earnings, 2010–2025 (CyStat, from Social Insurance records; all employees except domestic workers in private households). The average is published for every year. The median is published from 2018; for 2010–2017 it is estimated from CyStat's separate medians for men and women, a method that reproduces the published medians for 2018–2025 to within €15. The 2025 figures are CyStat's final data, published in October 2026.

An average that grows faster than the median can mean three different things. More people could be joining at the top, which lifts the average. Pay at the top could be rising faster than pay in the middle. Or more people could be joining at the bottom, which holds the median down while barely moving the average. The headline figures alone can't tell these apart. Splitting the workforce by citizenship can.

Who is arriving, and where they land

Workers from abroad are joining at both ends of the pay scale at once.

About one employee in three in Cyprus is not a Cypriot citizen. CyStat doesn't publish that share directly, but it can be worked out from figures it does publish. The overall average wage is a blend of the Cypriot and non-Cypriot averages, and only a mix of about two-thirds Cypriot to one-third non-Cypriot reproduces it. CyStat's quarterly figures on pay bands point to the same share.

CyStat sorts people by citizenship, not by where they were born or how long they have lived here. So "non-Cypriot" covers citizens of other EU countries, such as Greece and Romania, as well as people from outside the EU, and it includes people who have lived in Cyprus for decades without taking Cypriot citizenship. It doesn't mean "recent arrival".

The number from outside the EU has grown fastest. Leaving out domestic workers in private households, whom the wage figures don't include, non-EU citizens in work nearly tripled between 2019 and 2025, from about 21,000 to 59,000. Cypriot employment grew by 9% over the same years.

Now compare the two groups. In 2025 the median non-Cypriot employee earned €1,597 a month, €548 less than the median Cypriot. Yet the non-Cypriot average was only €101 below the Cypriot average.

Median and average gross monthly earnings by citizenship, 2025 (CyStat, final data). "Non-Cypriots" covers citizens of other EU countries and of countries outside the EU.

For Cypriots, the average is 22% above the median. For non-Cypriots it is 58% above. When a group's average sits that far above its middle, the group is spread out, with many people near the bottom and a sizeable number near the top. The pay bands show exactly that.

Share of employees in each monthly pay band, by citizenship, 2025 (CyStat, preliminary release).

Almost half of non-Cypriot employees, 48%, earn under €1,500 a month, compared with 29% of Cypriots. At the other end, 7.8% of non-Cypriots earn €6,000 or more, against 5.2% of Cypriots. Non-Cypriots are least common in the middle, between €1,500 and €4,500, which is where most Cypriots are.

The jobs explain why. Since 2019 non-EU workers have arrived in large numbers in sectors at both ends of the pay scale. In tech, non-EU employment went from about 800 people to 10,000, much of it after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when tech companies moved staff to Cyprus. Over the same years it more than tripled in hotels and restaurants, and rose by more than 3,000 in construction.

Non-EU citizens in work by sector, 2019 and 2025. These are CyStat's published figures from its Labour Force Survey, which interviews a sample of households and scales the answers up to the whole population, so each figure carries a margin of error. Small numbers, such as the 810 in tech in 2019, are the least precise, but a rise to more than 10,000 is far too large to be a sampling quirk. Domestic workers in private households are left out.

Within each sector, the two ends are paid very differently too. In tech, finance and professional services, non-EU employees earn far more than Cypriots in the same sector: in tech they averaged over €6,000 a month in 2022, roughly twice the Cypriot figure. In most other sectors they earn less, often by €500 a month or more.

Average monthly earnings by sector, Cypriot and non-EU employees, 2022 (CyStat Structure of Earnings Survey; annual earnings including bonuses, divided by twelve). This is a sample survey of employers rather than the full Social Insurance records used elsewhere, and some non-EU figures rest on small samples. A sector average mixes many different jobs, so this compares sectors, not identical roles.

So the same label covers a software developer earning over €6,000 a month and someone working in health and social care on about €1,600. Higher-paid arrivals lift the average. Lower-paid arrivals hold the median down. Both widen the gap between them.

Has this changed the overall picture, or only added to it? CyStat has published the split by citizenship for four years, 2022 to 2025. In that time the gap among Cypriots has stayed at 22% to 23%. The gap for all employees rose from 29.5% to 32.7%. Over those four years, Cypriots' own pay didn't become more stretched; the widening came from the non-Cypriot side.

How far the average sits above the median, as a percentage of the median (CyStat). The split by citizenship is published from 2022.

We can't split 2010 the same way, and there were already foreign workers in Cyprus then, so some of the widening since 2010 probably does come from Cypriot pay. But the timing fits the change in who is working here: the biggest single-year jump in the gap came in 2023, the year non-EU employment in tech more than doubled.

The raise that wasn't

Adjusted for prices, the median wage has grown 5% in fifteen years.

Every figure so far is in cash terms, the number printed on the payslip. What matters for living standards is what that money buys, and prices have risen too, by about 19% between 2010 and 2025. A lot of that came in two years: prices rose 8.4% in 2022 and 3.5% in 2023. In 2025 they barely moved, rising 0.1%.

Adjusted for prices, the median wage was lower every year from 2011 to 2023 than it had been in 2010. It fell through the banking crisis and austerity, recovered slowly, then dropped again when prices jumped in 2022. It only climbed back above its 2010 level in 2024, and only cleared it by a real margin in 2025.

Median gross monthly earnings, 2010–2025, as paid and adjusted to 2025 prices using consumer price inflation (World Bank, from CyStat's consumer price index). The dotted line marks the 2010 level; the faint dashed line is whichever view you aren't looking at. Medians for 2010–2017 are estimates, as above.

There are two ways to sum up pay, the average and the median, and two ways to count it, as paid or after prices. Over the same fifteen years they give four very different answers. The number in the headlines each spring is the average as paid, up 35% since 2010. For the worker in the middle, once rising prices are taken out, the gain is 5%.

Change in gross monthly earnings, 2010 to 2025 (CyStat). "After prices" adjusts for consumer price inflation. The 2010 median is an estimate, as above. CyStat does publish an inflation-adjusted change in the average each year, but it is the cash figure that leads the coverage.

Where Cyprus sits in Europe

Lower pay than the EU average, and the most stretched top end.

Cyprus pays well below the EU average. Eurostat put average full-time pay at €26,430 a year in 2023, against €37,900 across the EU, which is typical for a smaller southern economy. The unusual part is how far the top of the pay scale stretches away from the middle.

Eurostat measures this by comparing what you need to earn to be in a country's best-paid tenth with the median. In Cyprus the threshold is 2.5 times the median, the highest in the EU. In Sweden and Belgium it is 1.6 times. The further the top runs ahead of the middle, the higher the average floats above the median.

Monthly pay needed to join the best-paid 10% of employees, as a multiple of the median, 2022 (Eurostat, Structure of Earnings Survey). The survey covers firms with 10 or more employees and leaves out agriculture and public administration, so it mainly describes private-sector pay. Selected countries.

The bottom of the scale is less unusual. The cut-off for the lowest-paid tenth in Cyprus is about 60% of the median, in the middle of the EU range. But a large share of workers are close to it. By Eurostat's definition, which counts anyone earning less than two-thirds of the national median per hour as low-paid, 20% of employees in Cyprus are low-paid. That is the sixth-highest share in the EU, against an EU average of 14.7%.

Share of employees earning less than two-thirds of their country's median hourly pay, 2022 (Eurostat, Structure of Earnings Survey; same coverage as above). This measure uses hourly pay, while the rest of this piece uses monthly pay. Cyprus highlighted, EU average in amber.

One more thing the gross figures hide. Since 2019 employees have paid more of each euro in contributions. Social insurance went from 7.8% of pay to 8.3% in 2019 and 8.8% in 2024, and the GeSY health contribution added another 2.65%. On today's median wage that comes to about €224 a month, against €152 at the old rate. GeSY bought a national health system in return, but it means take-home pay has grown more slowly than the gross figures in this piece.

What the headline should say

The average isn't wrong. It is the right figure for some purposes, such as measuring the country's total wage bill. It misleads when it is read as what a normal job pays, and in Cyprus it is further from that than almost anywhere in the EU.

A fairer summary of the 2025 figures would be this. The typical employee earns €1,953 a month, about three-quarters of the average, and about 66% of employees earn less than the average. The gap between the two has widened for a decade, mostly because Cyprus has been hiring from abroad at both ends of the pay scale. And while the average CyStat reports has risen 35% since 2010, the median wage, once rising prices are taken into account, buys only about 5% more than it did then.

Average pay has kept rising in 2026, though more slowly. In the first three months of the year, average gross monthly earnings were 3.7% higher than in the same three months of 2025. Over full years, the average rose 7.3% in 2023, 5.1% in 2024 and 4.3% in 2025. CyStat publishes the median only once a year, so whether the gap is still widening won't be clear until the 2026 annual figures come out next spring. When they do, the median is the number to look at.