Average monthly take-home pay rose to NT$41,228 in October, up 2.56 percent from a year earlier, marking 11 consecutive months of annual growth of more than 2 percent, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday.
Total compensation averaged NT$45,632 in October, an increase of 2.5 percent from a year earlier, the statistics agency said.
“October’s growth extended the increases of the past 11 months — since December last year — and is a clear indicator that employers have increased employees’ monthly salaries in response to improved business,” DGBAS Deputy Director Pan Ning-hsin (潘寧馨) said.
However, the growth in average pay is distinct from increasing uncertainty in the global and domestic economies due to continued US-China trade tensions.
“The [salary] figures we collected were from October. Economic conditions of the past couple of months have not been as favorable as in previous months. We are closely monitoring how those changes [in the macroeconomy] will affect” the average wage, Pan said.
In the first 10 months of the year, the average wage, excluding performance bonuses and overtime pay, climbed 2.61 percent to NT$40,906, the agency said.
Aggregate compensation increased at a faster rate, up 4.08 percent to NT$52,632, which was a record high, the agency’s preliminary statistics showed.
The real-estate sector rose the fastest at an annual rate of 6.99 percent, followed by the retail and wholesale sectors at 5.72 percent and manufacturing at 4.72 percent, the agency’s tallies showed.
The data show that most employers preferred paying performance bonuses and overtime fees over increasing monthly pay, Pan said.
Deducting for inflation, real monthly pay remained stagnant during the January-to-October period, inching up an average of only 1 percent to NT$38,148, the statistics showed, which was an improvement, but still lagged behind the record NT$38,311 set in 2001.
This indicated that average take-home pay grew at a slower rate than inflation, or consumer prices, Pan told reporters.
In the first 10 months of the year, the number of employers rose 1.43 percent to about 7.66 million, the agency said.
During the same period, monthly working hours totaled 168.4, little changed from a year ago, and overtime rose 0.2 hours to 8.1, while overtime pay climbed 6.59 percent to NT$1,811 on average, the statistics showed.
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