United Kingdom vs Australia: net pay side by side
Nurses, doctors, engineers and tradespeople have been making this move for decades. The weather takes the credit, but the payslip deserves a fair share of it. Australia comes out in front at every income level below, and not by a small margin.
The figures compared
Every number here is produced by the site's own tax engine for that country. Open the full calculator if you want to tune the assumptions to your own case.
| Gross salary | 🇬🇧 United Kingdom net/mo | 🇦🇺 Australia net/mo |
|---|---|---|
| 40,000 / 70,000 | £2,693/mo (19.2%) | A$4,734/mo (18.8%) |
| 55,000 / 95,000 | £3,538/mo (22.8%) | A$6,151/mo (22.3%) |
| 75,000 / 130,000 | £4,505/mo (27.9%) | A$8,134/mo (24.9%) |
| 100,000 / 175,000 | £5,713/mo (31.4%) | A$10,451/mo (28.3%) |
Gross salary appears in each country's own currency at matching nominal values rather than converted, which is what you want when weighing up two offers quoted locally. The effective rate is in brackets.
Australia pays more and takes slightly less
This is a real double effect rather than a currency trick. Australian gross salaries for comparable roles usually come in 20 to 40% above British equivalents once converted, and on top of that the Australian effective tax rate runs a point or two below the British one at every income level shown here. Neither the Medicare Levy at 2% nor the Australian income tax bands punish the way the British personal allowance taper does, creating a 60% effective marginal rate between £100,000 and £125,140 that has no Australian counterpart.
What Britain provides that take-home pay never captures
The NHS pension, covering public sector roles such as nursing and medicine, is a defined-benefit scheme considerably more generous than Australia's compulsory superannuation guarantee, which is a market-exposed defined-contribution arrangement at 12%. Family and cultural proximity, easy access to European travel and shorter flights home are genuine non-financial factors that keep plenty of British professionals where they are despite the pay gap. For anyone judging purely on take-home pay, though, Australia is the stronger financial call at almost every career stage.
Questions readers ask
Australia, at every income level shown, on two counts: Australian gross salaries usually run higher for equivalent roles, and the Australian effective tax rate comes in 1 to 3 percentage points below the British one at matching income.
Pay, chiefly. Australian specialist and nursing salaries are typically higher in both gross and take-home terms than their NHS counterparts, and that gap has been a well-documented driver of British healthcare worker migration to Australia for years.
For public sector comparisons, generally not. The NHS Pension Scheme is a defined-benefit arrangement with guaranteed payouts, whereas Australian superannuation at a 12% employer contribution is defined-contribution and exposed to markets. British private sector pensions are usually defined-contribution too, which brings the comparison much closer outside the NHS.
It does not. These are nominal take-home figures with no purchasing-power adjustment. Housing costs in Sydney and Melbourne are broadly on a par with London, while other Australian cities are frequently more affordable.