The $150k Club Nobody's Actually In

Saw a stat doing the rounds this week that stopped me mid-scroll. Fewer than 15% of full-time Australian workers earn $150,000 or more. The average full-time salary sits around $110k, the median closer to $90k. I had to read it twice, not because I doubted it, but because it doesn’t match the vibe you get from certain corners of the internet.

Spend enough time on LinkedIn, or the finance side of Reddit, or even just half-listening to a barbecue conversation in a suburb slightly fancier than mine, and you’d think $150k was some kind of starting point for adulthood. It isn’t. It’s the top slice. Most people, including plenty of people with degrees, mortgages and teenage kids eating them out of house and home, are living well below that number.

I work in tech, IT specifically, which is one of those industries where salary chat online skews wildly upward. Scroll through certain forums and you’d think everyone in software is on $200k pulling remote work from a home office with a standing desk and a espresso machine that cost more than my first car. Some are. Most aren’t. I’ve been doing this a long time and I know plenty of solid, experienced developers and sysadmins sitting comfortably in the $90k to $120k range, doing good work, not complaining, just quietly not matching the online narrative.

Part of the problem is who gets loud on the internet. The person earning median wage in aged care or retail isn’t posting a breakdown of their budget on a finance subreddit. The people who do post tend to be either genuinely struggling and reaching out, or doing well and, consciously or not, setting a benchmark that skews the whole conversation. Social media doesn’t sample evenly. It samples loudly.

There’s also something very Melbourne, very Australian really, about how we talk around money instead of about it. We’ll happily debate house prices, interest rates, the price of a smashed avo on toast that started this whole cultural obsession a decade ago, but ask someone their actual salary and watch the room go quiet. That silence gets filled by guesswork, and guesswork tends to assume everyone else is doing better than they let on.

I get why. My own income sits above the median, comfortably so, and even I catch myself doing the mental maths against imagined peers, most of whom exist only as LinkedIn headlines. It’s a mug’s game. The person who tells you their salary online is rarely representative, and the person who doesn’t is the actual average.

None of this means people aren’t doing it tough. Median $90k sounds fine until you factor in Melbourne rent, energy bills that seem to reinvent themselves upward every quarter, and a teenager who apparently needs a new pair of shoes every six weeks for reasons I still don’t fully understand. The numbers being lower than the online vibe suggests doesn’t mean things are rosy. It means the vibe was wrong, not that the struggle was imagined.

What I took from the stat wasn’t reassurance exactly. More like recalibration. A useful reminder that most of us are somewhere in the middle of a distribution that social media actively distorts, and that feeling behind because of a skewed sample isn’t the same as actually being behind. Worth sitting with that difference before you start comparing your payslip to a stranger’s flex online.