Ministry: State Workers Earn 78-Percent More Than Private-Sector Employees

In Israel, a state job is a good job. The average state worker earned NIS 16,000 before taxes per month, figures released by the Finance Ministry Tuesday show. That salary is on average 78-percent higher than the amount the average nongovernmental worker in Israel earns, and represents a jump of 56 percent in the past decade – significantly more than the inflation rate.

Pay raises for state workers even outperformed the increase in the minimum wage, which rose 51.4 percent between 2007 and 2017. The average Israeli worker in both the public and private sector earned about NIS 9,800 a month. All figures were for 2017, the last year that full figures were available.

The figures also listed the top wage-earners in Israel (sans personal identifying information). The best paid public employee in the country is a doctor at Hadassah hospital, who earns NIS 252,784 a month. The following two top earnings – at NIS 181,954 and NIS 160,492 – are also on medical staff in public hospitals or HMOs. The highest paid head of a state corporation is the CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries, who earns NIS 125,549 a month.

Within specific industries, the highest paid workers are employees of the Haifa and Ashdod ports, who earn NIS 33,000 and NIS 30,000 on average. They are followed by employees of the Bank of Israel (NIS 28,000/month on average), Israel Electric Company workers (NIS 27,432), State Lottery employees (NIS 26,803), and employees of IAI, the Clalit HMO, and the National Coal Corporation, all of whom earn NIS 24,000 a month on average.

Although the unions representing them claim that social workers are chronically underpaid, the figures show that social workers employed in state-funded institutions earn an average of NIS 13,604 a month, nearly 30-percent more than the average Israeli’s salary. Some social workers earn over NIS 22,000 a month, the figures show.