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WORKING IN NORWAY

Five things to know about wages in Norway

Norway is a great country to live and work in, and many point to the high salaries as a major pull factor. Here’s what you need to know about the wages in Norway. 

Published: 19 April 2024 13:04 CEST
Updated: 26 April 2024 13:17 CEST
Pictured is a person in the old district of Oslo.
There are several important things you need to know about the wages in Norway. Pictured is a person in the old district of Oslo. Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

Norway doesn’t have a minimum wage 

Many wrongly assume that the high wages in Norway must be the result of a high minimum wage. 

However, the country doesn’t have a minimum wage which covers all sectors. Instead, wages are agreed upon through negotiations between trade unions and individual employers or employer organisations. 

This contributes to high levels of trade union membership in Norway. 

Those who aren’t in a union or sectors where membership isn’t widespread negotiate their own wages. 

Some industries, where workers are likely to be exploited or where there may be a large number of foreign workers, have minimum wages enforced by the Norwegian Labour Inspection Authority.

READ MORE: Which industries in Norway have a minimum wage?

How Norwegian wages compare 

The average salary in Norway (more on that later) was 56,360 kroner per month in 2023. 

This equates to an annual salary of around 676,000 kroner. This is a salary equivalent to 49,000 pounds, 57,510 euros, or 61,266 dollars. 

The average annual salary in the US is 59,428, according to Forbes magazine.  Eurostat, the official statistics office of the European Union, measured the average annual salary for a single worker without children at 26,136 euros and 55,573 euros for a working couple with two children. 

However, wages vary greatly across the EU. In 2022, the net annual earnings of an average single worker without children were 47,640 euros in Luxembourg compared to 8,412 euros in Bulgaria. 

Meanwhile, the average Dane earns 46,972 Danish kroner before taxes, according to Statistics Denmark. This is around 73,981 Norwegian kroner. In Sweden, the average salary was around 38,300 Swedish krona or roughly 38,534 Norwegian kroner. 

Average wage versus median wage 

The average monthly wage of 56,360 kroner is pulled up by the very highest earners. The highest earners in Norway are found in the private sector. 

Statistics Norway used to keep data on the very highest earners, and around 41,600 people were in the top one percent in 2021 (the year Statistics Norway last kept data) 

To be in Norway’s top one percent required annual earnings of 1.8 million kroner or 150,000 kroner monthly. 

The median wage is a far more modest 50,660 kroner. 

Income tax 

Norway uses a mixture of progressive and flat taxation. The majority of wage earners in Norway, they will pay a flat income tax of 22 per cent, along with a bracketed tax based on earnings. 

The bracket tax ranges between 1.7 and 17.5 percent, depending on one’s earnings. This means that you can have income tax of up to 39.5 percent in Norway. 

Foreigner workers who are new to Norway will be sorted into the PAYE scheme. This is a flat tax rate of 25 percent, however there are no deductibles available. After a year, they will be sorted into Norway’s regular tax system. 

Norway’s gender and immigrant wage gap 

Foreigners in Norway typically make less money than their Norwegian counterparts. The average salary for a foreign resident in Norway is around 50,270 kroner per month, according to figures from the national data agency Statistics Norway.

Furthermore, when you take immigrants out of the wage statistics, the average wage rises to 58,190 kroner. 

The highest earners amongst foreigners in Norway were those  from North America and Oceania. They made 61,810 kroner on average. 

Africans, and those from countries that joined the EU after 2004, had the lowest earnings among all immigrant groups in Norway. 

While women’s wages increased more than men’s last year, a gender wage gap still exists in Norway. An average woman’s salary amounted to 88.3 percent of a man’s monthly pay packet.

A bigger gap existed between Norwegian men and foreign women. 

READ ALSO: How much money do Norway’s different foreigners make?

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For members

WORKING IN NORWAY

‘There was noone doing it’: The story behind Oslo’s only English bookstore

Six months after launching Oslo's only English language bookstore, Seattle native Indigo Trigg-Hauger doesn't regret a thing.

Published: 30 April 2024 15:05 CEST
Updated: 5 May 2024 10:22 CEST
'There was noone doing it': The story behind Oslo's only English bookstore

“I really love it. I love that I can finally use my communication skills for something that is purely my own and I just love being in the store, meeting new people, and getting to recommend books,” she tells The Local. 

Prismatic Pages, in the happening Oslo district of Grünerløkka, is already building up a steady following both among English speakers and readers and among Norwegians, with its packed schedule of events like book swaps, book clubs, and silent reading evenings.  

“The English speaking and reading community in Oslo in general is becoming more and more aware of it, and I have some repeat customers who are really spreading the word, which is amazing,” Trigg-Hauger says.

“But it’s sort of a slow burn. Even though all of our events have been standing room only, there are still people coming in every day who say ‘I didn’t know the store was here’, or, like, ‘someone just told me about this’, so I can see that we still have a lot of potential people to reach.” 

Trigg-Hauger inherited her fascination with Norway from her mother, who studied in Oslo as an exchange student and still speaks rusty Norwegian. 

“I always had the impression that we were Norwegian when I was a very young kid, and then I grew up and realised ‘oh, actually, no, she just loves Norway’.” 

She studied Scandinavian Studies at The University of Washington, came away from her year-long exchange year at the University of Oslo with a Bachelor’s degree in History, and then returned to Oslo a year later to do a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies. 

“I learned Norwegian pretty quickly after I arrived, just because I had a little bit of a basis and I did an intensive course as well, so I am fluent and I have dual citizenship now,” she says. 

These language skills, together with the journalism she’d been doing on the side throughout her studies meant she fell on her feet on graduation, getting a job in communications at the prestigious Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) almost immediately, and then moving on three years later to a similar job at Norfund, Norway’s state development finance institution. 

“After only a year, I realised, this just isn’t for me anymore,” she says of the Norfund job. “I’m really good at communications, but I was tired of only doing it for other people’s projects and not my own. I think I’m very creative and independent. So I needed to do something a bit more flexible and something that was more driven by me.” 

Around this time, during coffee with a friend, she mentioned that she had worked in a bookshop in her home town, Leavenworth, for a year between studies. 

“I said, ‘that’s the only job I’ve ever really enjoyed’, and she said ‘well, you should just open a bookstore’. To which obviously I said ‘that’s crazy’, but then I actually did start to think about it.” 

Indigo Trigg-Hauger ran a book stall in May 2023 as part of her market research. Photo: Prismatic Pages

What helped push her to actually do it was a new scheme run by the local Grünerløkka city area called Lokalstart, where those accepted receive three months of free training followed by continued mentoring to start a business. 

“That really just, like, pushed me to do it,” she remembers. “Part of the course that for me was very helpful was that my course leader and my mentor encouraged me to do some market research. So I actually started in, just about a year ago, in May, I started doing just a table at a local market and I was seeing, like, quite a bit of enthusiasm.”

She realised that while Oslo had several independent bookstores, such as a queer bookstore, and an anarchist bookstore, there wasn’t an English-only one, and certainly not one which did what independent bookstores do in the US. 

“There was no one doing what I wanted to do, which was used and new mixed together and buying used books from customers, which in the US is pretty common for independent bookstores,” she said. 

So last August she handed in her notice, although she worked until the end of the year, and in December she finally opened Prismatic Pages, raising more than 60,000 kroner through the Norwegian crowdfunding site Spleis.

“I ran a crowdfunding campaign, which was also very helpful because I could both market the business and kind of get people’s buy-in, literally.”

She wanted Prismatic Pages to feel more open as a space than more traditional bookshops that she feels can be claustrophobic and worked with an interior designer friend to select the right colour scheme, furnishings and layout. 

“A lot of my inspiration just comes from the bookstores I grew up going to in Seattle, where I’m from, and also the store that I worked at, which was in a small town called Leavenworth, where we would also have small events. It really was like a community space where, of course, we had a lot of tourists and visitors, but also a lot of repeat customers. I was a repeat customer before I was an employee.” 

As for the books, she likes it to be an eclectic mix: something for everyone but still curated. 

“When it comes to books, I think humans are the best algorithm. Of course, some of it is personal taste, but I try not to let that get too much in the way of my selection. It’s a complicated mix of new releases, classics, maybe overlooked releases from the past. And then things that customers tell me about, and I just try to read up a lot on what other people are reading, you know, articles that recommend different lists of books.”

“Of course, sometimes there are themes, like, for example, Pride Month is coming up. I already have a queer literature section, but I’ll be beefing that up a little bit for June, and with the Easter crime season, we had a lot more crime in.” 

Prismatic Pages is already, she feels, a social space of a sort that is unusual in Oslo, particularly when the store holds events when people bring their own books and swap with one another.

“I love that people really start talking to each other,” she said of those events. “It’s kind of rare in Norway for strangers just to talk to each other. But they’ll start picking up each other’s books and discussing them, and that’s really nice.” 

The constant stream of customers also suits her sociable nature in a way her largely desk-bound communication jobs did not. 

“I’ve always been really social anyway. So I’m really active in many different activities. So it’s very nice that a lot of people come by from different areas of my life, all the way back from, like, 10 years ago, when I was an exchange student, up to my most recent jobs. I guess it’s good for my socially extroverted self to get to see new and old faces.”

What remains to be seen, she admits, is whether her new profession of bookseller will be work in the long run. 

“Time will tell if it is financially sustainable,” she says. “I do pay myself something, but it’s not really quite enough yet. So, you know, I don’t want people to think, ‘oh, it’s all just been rainbows and butterflies’. Because, you know, opening a small business is a huge challenge.” 

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