Hessian employees get an average of 300 euros more wages per month than four years ago, Frankfurters collect one and a half times as much as employees in northern Hesse, and the so-called gender pay gap has narrowed somewhat: These are the results of new pay statistics from the Federal Employment Agency.

The basis is the salary information that employers report to the social security funds.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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On average, full-time employees in Hesse now earn 3,799 euros gross per month.

In 2017 it was 3494 euros.

This shows that wages have increased despite the pandemic.

The increase in wages over these four years totaled 8.7 percent.

At the same time, however, prices have risen by eight percent.

If you add inflation since the beginning of the year, prices are now even more than 14 percent higher than in 2017.

Hessian employees therefore have less purchasing power in real terms than they did four years ago.

However, trade unions are currently pushing for significantly higher wage agreements than in the past and have already been able to push through some of them this year.

Wage gap of 400 euros

The employment agency does not simply calculate the average of all salaries in its statistics, but calculates the median.

That's the value that would be right in the middle of a list of all salaries by amount.

Compared to the normal average value, the median has the advantage that it is less susceptible to distortions due to a few extremely high or few extremely low wages.

According to the statistics in Hesse, women are still paid slightly less than men, the difference in salary is around 400 euros, as it was four years ago.

However, since women's wages have risen in absolute terms just as much as men's, the percentage gap has narrowed slightly and is now only around ten percent.

This can be explained, among other things, by the fact that the majority of women work in poorly paid professions and sectors, but also, for example, that their careers are slower after the birth of a child.

What is not shown in these statistics is that more than half of the women in Hesse work part-time and thus earn even less.

Educators earn average wages

According to this statistic, one of the poorly paying branches of the economy is gastronomy, in which even full-time employees only earn a gross salary of 2,200 euros.

In the hotel industry and building cleaning, earnings are similarly low.

Gastronomy and hotels pay only about a third of what employees in banks and insurance companies get, which come to a median of almost 6200 euros.

Employed doctors in Hesse earn the best with 6900 euros.

Childcare workers, secretaries and educators are pretty much right on average.