Take-home pay recovers in March 2018

According to a report on the website BusinessTech (source), take-home pay picked up again in March after a long period (since 2016) where the rate of growth for wages simply did not keep up with inflation. According to BT, this information was taken from BankservAfrica’s latest monthly data.

BankservAfrica admitted that while the hike wasn’t exceptional because of other economic factors, we can take heart that South Africans employed in the formal sector are taking home an increase of 0.9% more pay. This was the percentage increase year-on-year in March 2018.

“The average salary is edging up with the typical – or median – salary faring a little better and increasing by 2.2% since March 2017 above the rate of inflation. In the past year, typical take-home pay has increased by 0.8% more than the average,” it said.

BankservAfrica noted that the proportion of employees receiving between R50,000 – R100,000 increased to 2.5% of the total in March compared to 2.1% in March 2017.

“In addition, this is the first time since December 2017 that the number of people taking pay home in this range were over 75,000 employees out of over 3 million employees. The number of employees receiving between R50,000 – R100,000 increased by 17.1% since March 2017,” it said.

At the same time those earning less than R4,000 decreased by 6.8% over the same period, BankservAfrica found.

“In March 2018, employees with take-home pay of over R25,000 per month were more than those earning under R4,000. Therefore, take-home pay for those earning between R4 000 – R25 000 was still the dominant category at 44.9% (other than in December, which is the highest bonus pay-out month),” it said.

This does, however, represent a bias to larger employers and excludes those who receive actual cash. The growth in those receiving more than R10,000 in their bank account has been close to 9% on average over the last year,” BankservAfrica said.