Average Israeli salary rises slightly to NIS 11,004 per month
Mean monthly pay increases by 3.4% since last year; highest paid sector is information and communications, lowest is food and hospitality industries
Luke Tress is a JTA reporter and a former editor and reporter in New York for The Times of Israel.
![Illustrative: The DLD Tel Aviv Digital Conference, Israel's largest high tech gathering, September 27, 2016. The tech industry is the among the highest paid in Israel, with an average salary of NIS 23,375 ($6,719) per month. (Miriam Alster/Flash90) Illustrative: The DLD Tel Aviv Digital Conference, Israel's largest high tech gathering, September 27, 2016. The tech industry is the among the highest paid in Israel, with an average salary of NIS 23,375 ($6,719) per month. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)](https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2019/10/Untitled-8-1-640x400.jpg)
The average Israeli salary stood at 11,004 NIS ($3,163) per month, as of July 2019, the Central Bureau of Statistics reported on Sunday.
The sum marked an increase of 3.4 percent over the same period last year.
The number of salaried workers in the country was 3,812,000, an increase of 1.8%.
The highest paid industry was the information and communications sector, which includes many technology companies, where the average pay was NIS 22,122 ($6,358) per month, followed by financial and insurance services, where the mean salary was NIS 20,153 ($5,792).
Israel’s 329,500 high-tech workers made an average of NIS 23,375 ($6,719) per month, an increase of 4% over the previous year, with science researchers and developers leading this group, at NIS 25,517 ($7,334).
The lowest paid sector was the hospitality and food industry, where the average pay was only NIS 5,150 ($1,480).
The education field had the largest number of salaried workers, with 546,800 people making an average of NIS 9,106 ($2,617) per month.
Healthcare and welfare service workers, another major sector with 439,500 salaried employees, took home a below-average salary of NIS 9,680 ($2,782).
Wages were not equally distributed — 66.5% of salaried workers, 2,534,000 people, were employed in fields where the average pay was below the national average.