Senior finance manager was the best-paid role in 2025 with a median advertised salary of €100,000, a report on pay by hiring platform IrishJobs has found.
Senior software engineers attracted the highest salaries in the IT sector at €95,000, while advertisements for risk manager positions had a median salary of €85,000. In the construction sector, site operations manager positions were advertised at the €80,000 mark, with salaries in the sector growing amid a shortage of workers.
Across Ireland, the median salary in jobs advertised was €54,928, which compares to €38,304 (£33,526) in the UK and €53,900 in Germany, the research found, citing data from IrishJobs parent company the Stepstone Group.
Roles in information technology had the highest salaries alongside those in the banking and finance sectors, in which the median advertised salaries stood at €80,000. This was closely followed by positions in the construction and legal sectors, which had pay levels of about €75,000.
Median pay, which is often used instead of averages to reduce the distortionary impact of outliers, in the engineering and healthcare sectors, stood at about €70,000. The sectors with the lowest pay were sales at a median of €45,000, social care at €46,800 and manufacturing at €55,000.
On a regional basis, Dublin was the county with the highest advertised salaries, a median of €60,000, followed by Galway at €52,000, driven by its life science and healthcare sectors, and Cork at €46,200.
IrishJobs also found that more than half (58 per cent) of Irish professionals had received a pay increase during 2025, leaving the rest without an adjustment during a cost-of-living crisis.
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The research is based on an analysis of advertised salary and benefit trends from 1.3 million job adverts across the Irish market, but was limited by just 38 per cent of the adverts including salary information.
“That is set to change,” according to Christopher Paye, the country director of The StepStone Group Ireland, citing the upcoming changes to pay transparency due to new European Union legislation set to come into effect in June 2026.
Mr Paye said it would “force the hand of employers to share salary information with job seekers”, which he said would change how “employers advertise roles and how candidates assess opportunities”.
He said the increased transparency would mean companies on the lower end of the pay scales being forced to reveal pay levels, which is likely to cause a “huge shift” in the median advertised salaries that IrishJobs reports.
His “gut feeling” is that the median would be adjusted downwards by the widened salary information.
Hybrid working continues to be important to jobseekers, and mentions of the benefit in job listings increased by 38 per cent year on year. The benefit with the largest increase in offering frequency was company share schemes, which rose by 260 per cent according to the report.