Forty-six out of every 100 Nigerian workers earn below ₦200,000 ($150) per month, according to a new salary report by PaidHR, a Nigerian human resources and payroll startup. The report offers a detailed picture of what employers pay employees across Nigeria's formal labour market.

PaidHR said it analysed payroll records covering more than 25,000 workers at over 400 Nigerian employers, drawing on a July 2026 snapshot of active employees on its platform.

A two-tier labour market

The findings reveal a wide gap between the lower and upper ends of the salary scale. Of every 100 workers in the dataset, 46 earn below ₦200,000 ($150) a month, while 10 earn at least ₦1 million ($751.93).

"The shape of the distribution suggests that Nigeria's formal workforce is not one evenly distributed middle class; it is increasingly a two-tier labour market," Seye Bandele, PaidHR's co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCabal in an interview. "A large group is clustered around relatively low wages, alongside a much smaller professional group earning substantially more."

Formal employment remains a narrow slice of Nigeria's overall labour market. According to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the country's labour force participation rate rose to 79.5% in Q2 2024, and formal employment accounts for roughly 7.0% to 7.3% of the total employed workforce. Only a fraction of the workforce earns a regular wage from an employer, and for these workers, earnings depend on their job, experience, industry, and how their employers value their skills. PaidHR's figures sit inside that narrow formal slice: they are drawn from payroll records on a single provider's platform, capturing formal employers and their staff rather than the more than nine in ten employed Nigerians working outside formal employment.

The report's anchor is the median — the worker standing in the middle when every salary earner is lined up from lowest paid to highest. That worker earns ₦217,000 ($163.17) in monthly gross pay and takes home ₦199,972 ($150) after deductions such as pension contributions, income tax, and other payroll items.

At the bottom of the scale, 10 out of every 100 workers in the dataset earn below ₦70,000 ($52.64) — Nigeria's national minimum wage, signed into law in 2024 — placing one in ten of the workers captured in the data beneath the country's statutory pay floor.

The findings land as Nigeria's cost of living continues to climb. Fuel prices have pushed up transport costs, while food, rent, and electricity bills compete for a share of monthly income. For the median worker taking home ₦199,972 ($150), those costs come out of a fixed monthly sum. Inflation has eased from its recent peak, but lower inflation does not mean prices have returned to where they were before. An earlier edition of the report, covered by TechCabal in 2024, found that most Lagosians earn less than ₦400,000 a month.

The five-year wall

The report also questions the value of sustained loyalty to a single employer. Career progression has traditionally been built around accumulating experience that eventually leads to higher pay, but PaidHR's data suggests salary growth is strongest during the first few years with an employer before slowing down.

Workers with less than a year at their current job earn a median salary of ₦181,235 ($136.28). Pay rises with tenure and peaks around the five-year mark, when the middle worker earns about 47% more than someone at entry level. After that, the gains become far less consistent.

PaidHR describes this point as the "five-year wall" — the stage at which staying longer with an employer no longer delivers the same salary gains as the early years.

"The interesting thing is that experience itself stops being enough to generate significant salary growth," Bandele said. "The report's explanation is that the market regularly reprices jobs, but employers do not necessarily reprice their existing employees at the same pace. As a result, someone who stays in the same organisation can become underpaid relative to what the market is willing to pay for their experience."

The mechanics are straightforward. An employee who joined a company five years ago may have received annual raises, but a new hire entering the same role is recruited at the current market rate. If the market has moved faster than the company's salary reviews, the new employee can arrive on a salary that the existing worker has taken years to reach.

PaidHR argues that this creates an incentive for workers to look outside their current organisations when seeking a significant salary increase, as bigger gains may be found by changing employers or moving into a higher-paying industry. Two workers with similar skills and experience can earn very different salaries because their employers operate in markets with different capacities and willingness to pay, the report suggests.

"Where you work changes what you earn as much as what you do," Bandele said.

Sector and gender divides

PaidHR's sector data points to wide disparities. The middle salary in fintech and technology is ₦418,916 ($315), compared with ₦80,000 ($60.15) in retail, hospitality, and leisure. Banking, lending, and financial services sit at ₦230,491 ($173.31), while healthcare and pharmaceuticals have a middle salary of ₦169,423 ($127.39). The gap indicates that workers with similar skills may face very different earning prospects depending on their industry.

Nigeria's technology and fintech companies have attracted substantial venture funding over the past decade, helping some employers build products and compete for specialised talent in a global market. According to the report, however, that funding does not automatically translate into higher salaries.

The report also identifies a gender gap. The middle woman in the dataset earns ₦192,089 ($144.44) a month, compared with ₦238,103 ($179.04) for the middle man — meaning women earn about 81 kobo ($0.00061) for every ₦1 ($0.00075) men earn at the middle of the salary scale. The report does not establish the causes of the gap, but differences within individual companies suggest it cannot be explained solely by men and women working in different industries.

Taken together, the findings suggest that a worker's positioning in the labour market shapes salary growth. Experience matters but may not be enough to secure higher pay; skills matter, but the same skill can command different salaries in different; and staying with an employer can become costly if salary reviews do not keep pace with the market.

Outlook

PaidHR's forecast projects that the median salary could rise from ₦217,000 ($163.17) in 2026 to ₦380,000 ($285.73) by 2030, assuming annual salary growth of roughly 15%. Even then, a higher salary does not equate to greater purchasing power. If the prices of food, transport, housing, and other essentials rise as fast as, or faster than, wages, workers may earn more without being able to afford much more. In the meantime, the report serves as a 2026 baseline for formal-sector pay — one that, alongside its 2024 predecessor, offers a reference point against which future salary figures can be measured.