What the world pays.
Every country, one table.

How to read this table

Federal / national

The top statutory marginal rate charged by the central government on employment income, including national surtaxes. Excludes anything a state or municipality adds, and excludes employee social-security contributions.

State / local

The highest sub-national income tax that stacks on top — state (US), provincial (Canada), cantonal and communal (Switzerland), regional and municipal (Italy, Spain, Scandinavia), or prefectural (Japan). A dash means the country has no sub-national income tax at all.

Total income tax

The highest combined marginal rate a resident can face. In federal systems this is a worst-case ceiling: a Californian hits 50.3% while a Texan stops at 37%, and a Genevan pays 43% where a Zuger pays 22%. Where a mandatory income-linked levy is universally treated as part of the headline rate — France's CSG, Ireland's USC, Australia's Medicare levy, Denmark's labour-market contribution — it is folded in and flagged on the row.

Corporate

The combined statutory rate (central plus sub-central) on ordinary trading profits of a resident company. Concessional regimes, small-profits rates and Pillar Two top-ups are noted on the rows they apply to.

Effective rate, You keep

Every other tax column on this page is a top marginal rate — what the last dollar of a high earner is taxed at. This one is what an average earner actually loses: income tax plus employee social security, less cash benefits, as a share of gross pay, for a single worker with no children on the country's average wage. It is the column that makes the rest of the row describe one person rather than two, and it is the only place social contributions appear at all — in France, Germany and Belgium those are a bigger bite than income tax. The gap against Total income tax is usually large: Sweden's top rate is 52.3% but its average earner pays 23.1%. Occasionally it runs the other way — Romania charges a 10% flat income tax and around 35% in employee contributions, so an average Romanian pays 36.9%, one of Europe's heaviest, out of what looks like its lightest tax code. Bulgaria, Hungary and Lithuania invert for the same reason. OECD members only; the OECD average is 25.1%.

Capital gains, Crypto

Top rate an individual pays on gains from listed shares, and on crypto disposals. A 0% here is usually deliberate policy rather than missing data — Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand and the Gulf genuinely do not tax private capital gains. The crypto figure is a single headline rate so the column stays sortable, but the detail sits in each row's note and it matters: Germany and Portugal drop to 0% past a one-year hold, Japan taxes shares at 20.3% but crypto as miscellaneous income at up to 55%, and India charges 30% flat with no loss offset plus 1% withheld on every trade.

Net salary

Average monthly take-home pay — after income tax and employee social contributions — converted at market exchange rates into USD. This is an average, not a median, and it comes from a crowd-sourced dataset, so it skews urban and professional. Read it as an order of magnitude, not a payslip.

Gold per year

Twelve months of that net salary divided by the spot gold price — the troy ounces a year of work buys. Gold is the honest yardstick for tracking onecountry over time, because it cannot be printed and it is not deflated by an index the same government publishes. Across countries it is weaker than it looks: gold has a single world price, so this column is arithmetically just net salary in USD rescaled by a constant, and it inherits market FX's bias against poorer countries where rent and food cost far less than the exchange rate implies. Edit the gold price above to re-base the whole column.

Median income (PPP)

Median equivalised disposable household income per year, in purchasing-power-parity dollars. Every word does work: median so billionaires cannot skew it the way they skew GDP per capita, equivalised for household size, disposable meaning after tax and after transfers, and PPPso it measures what the money actually buys locally. This is the best single answer to “whose citizens are doing best” — and where it disagrees with the gold column, the gap is the story. OECD and partner economies only.

VAT / sales tax, Reduced rate

The second bite. Income tax is charged on money coming in; VAT, GST and sales tax are charged again on the way out, so a country with a modest income tax and a 27% VAT is not the low-tax jurisdiction its income column suggests. Reduced rate is the lowest band the country operates, which is usually where food sits — the gap between the two columns is how much a government shelters essentials. A dash in the standard column means no general consumption tax at all, which is different from 0%: Hong Kong, Macau, Qatar, Kuwait and the Crown dependencies genuinely levy none. The United States has no federal VAT, so its figure is the population-weighted average combined state and local sales tax, ranging from 0% in four states to 10.13% in Louisiana.

VAT on spending

The consumption tax already sitting inside a month of non-rent spending. This is not an extra cost to add to the columns beside it. The prices behind Rent, Food and Basics are till prices — they already include VAT — so this extracts the tax portion of money the other columns say is already spent, using the tax-inclusive formula (a $1,270 basket at 27% contains $270 of tax, not $343). Residential rent is VAT-exempt in nearly every system, so rent is excluded. Treat it as an upper bound: it applies the standard rate to the whole basket, when food, transport and utilities often sit in the reduced band shown one column over.

Rent, Food, Basics, Cost to live

Rent is a one-bedroom apartment in the city centre. Basics is everything else a single person spends in a month — food, utilities, transport, leisure and incidentals. Cost to live is the two added together. Food is shown as a price index (New York = 100) rather than dollars, because the source publishes groceries as an index; utilities and transport are only published bundled inside Basics, so they do not get their own columns. The dollar figures are derived: the source reports indices, which were calibrated against exact published costs for the US, Japan and India — a fit that holds to about 1% across a ten-fold cost range, so treat the dollars as good to roughly ±5%. One asymmetry to keep in mind: the basket excludes health insurance. The US figure therefore omits several hundred dollars a month an American actually pays, while the German or French figure implicitly includes healthcare because it is prepaid through the taxes shown further left. The same goes for university tuition and childcare. The effect is to flatter low-tax, private-provision countries and understate high-tax ones — read Cost to live alongside the Effective rate column, not instead of it.

Left over, Gold stacked

Take-home pay minus the cost to live, and the ounces of gold a year of that surplus buys. This is the closest thing on the page to an answer for “which countries actually provide an ample income”, because it nets out the cost of existing there — a big salary in an expensive city is not the same as money kept. A negative figure is not a data error. It means one average wage does not cover living alone in a city-centre one-bedroom, which is the norm across most of the world — households pool incomes, share housing, and live outside the centre. Read the shortfall rows as a statement about that standard, not about destitution.

These are statutory top marginal rates, not effective rates — nobody pays the top rate on their first dollar, and deductions, credits and thresholds vary enormously. Tax sources: PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Tax Foundation, OECD Corporate Tax Statistics and national tax authorities. Income sources: Numbeo (net salary, 2026) and the OECD Income Distribution Database / LIS (median disposable income, PPP). Consumption tax sources: PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries VAT quick chart, Tax Foundation VAT Rates in Europe 2026 for the reduced and super-reduced bands, and Tax Foundation State and Local Sales Tax Rates 2026 for the United States. Cost-of-living sources: Numbeo Cost of Living Index by Country, 2026 mid-year, calibrated to absolute dollars against Numbeo's own country pages. That sample is urban, formal-sector and partly expatriate, so in countries with a large informal economy the cost columns and the average-wage column describe different populations — the further down the table you read, the more the surplus column is a signal rather than a measurement. Data vintage differs by column and is worth knowing: tax, VAT, capital gains, net salary and cost of living are 2026; effective rates are 2025 OECD figures with a few 2024 fallbacks; median disposable income at PPP is the 2021 OECD/LIS series and is the oldest thing here. Reference only — not tax or investment advice.