How employee jobs can help explain wages and salaries growth
The February 2026 release of the Monthly Employee Earnings Indicator (MEEI) includes a new employee jobs measure. This measure adds useful context to the interpretation of monthly wages and salaries growth.
This article explains what an employee job is and how it is derived. It also provides some examples on the combined use of employee jobs with wages and salaries.
An employee job is defined in the ABS Labour Statistics Concepts, Sources and Methods glossary as a job for which the occupant receives remuneration in wages or salary from an employer.
In the MEEI, an employee job is derived in a reference month, when wages and salaries are paid to an employee (or salary is sacrificed to superannuation).
The presence of termination payments in the reference period are excluded from the derivation an employee job.
An employee job is conceptually similar to the filled jobs measure (for employees only) reported in the ABS Labour Account. This concept, along with other employment measures used across ABS releases, are explained further in the Industry employment guide.
The number of employees paid is a key compositional driver of wages and salaries growth. Considering changes in employee jobs alongside wages and salaries, over the same period, can provide improved insights into both short and long‑term growth.
Several insights are demonstrated in the following examples.
Like wages and salaries, employee jobs are presented as an original series only, as seasonally adjusted and trend estimates are not yet available. However, seasonal fluctuations in employee jobs can still provide new insights into the seasonal change in wages and salaries.
Employee jobs data show that the slight seasonal falls in wages and salaries around school and university term breaks or holiday periods are often driven by fewer employee jobs.
This pattern is observed in several industries, however is most pronounced in the Education and training industry.
Without the context provided by employee jobs, periodic peaks in wages and salaries in industries such as Mining could be misread as short‑term growth.
However, the limited change in employee jobs and the regularity of these payments suggest the influence of cyclical bonuses.
a) The leap year day in 2024 alters the seasonal change usually seen in wages and salaries, in February and March 2024. For more information see the leap year effect section within Factors affecting interpretation.
Additional insight can be achieved by directly comparing wages and salaries with employee jobs through the calculation of average monthly wages and salaries per employee job.
This comparison is especially useful across industries where similar volumes of wages and salaries are paid, but the number of employees differs.
Closely related industries such as Retail trade and Wholesale trade illustrate this pattern, where Retail trade consistently reports higher monthly wages and salaries and a greater number of employee jobs than Wholesale trade.
However, the Wholesale trade industry has significantly higher average monthly wages and salaries than Retail trade, largely due to differences in labour demand and skill requirements.
There are factors that influence the interpretation of movements in employee jobs that differ from those affecting wages and salaries paid:
Estimates of monthly total wages and salaries paid by employers and employee jobs in the MEEI provide complementary insights to other ABS labour market statistics. Differences between concepts, sources, scope and methodology of labour market statistics produced by the ABS can affect interpretation when comparing estimates for similar time periods.
Aside from differences which affect the components of wages and salaries and employee jobs equally, the following may impact comparisons of employee jobs more specifically when compared to other labour market measures:
The Employment section and Jobs section of the Labour Statistics Concepts, Source and Methods explains the various concepts of employment and jobs and how employee jobs relate to these concepts.
The STP dataset is a rich and complex administrative data source, based on reporting from around 800,000 businesses. The ABS continues to build its understanding of the dataset and how best to produce statistics from it, with ongoing methodological enhancements. Accordingly, the MEEI estimates are currently considered experimental.
The new employee jobs measure is currently available for a limited time series and output levels:
Expanded outputs will be prioritised to service emerging user interest, as resourcing permits. The ABS welcomes user feedback to assist in output prioritisation via labour.statistics@abs.gov.au.
For more information on the MEEI or labour statistics more broadly, see: