Almost half of Nigerian workers earn less than $150 monthly, report finds

46 out of every 100 Nigerian workers earn below ₦200,000 ($150) monthly, according to a new salary report by PaidHR, a Nigerian human resources and payroll startup.

The report offers a visual of what employers pay employees in Nigeria’s formal labour market. PaidHR said it analysed payroll records for more than 25,000 workers across over 400 Nigerian employers, using a July 2026 snapshot of active employees on its platform.

The findings show 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.”

Nigeria’s labour force participation rate rose to 79.5% in Q2 2024, and formal employment accounts for about 7.0% to 7.3% of the total employed workforce. However, only a fraction of the workforce earns a regular wage from an employer, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). For these workers, earnings depend on their job, experience, industries, and how their employers value their skills.

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 and takes home ₦199,972 ($150) after deductions, such as pension contributions, income tax, and other payroll deductions.

At the bottom of the scale, the report noted that 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.

As Nigeria’s cost of living increases, fuel prices have pushed up transport costs, while food, rent and electricity bills compete for a share of monthly income. Inflation has eased from its recent peak, but lower inflation does not mean prices have returned to where they were before.

The report’s findings also question the value of sustained loyalty to a single employer. Career progression has been built around accumulating experience that will eventually lead to higher pay. 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 much less consistent.

PaidHR’s report describes this as the five-year wall. It is the point at which staying longer with an employer no longer delivers the same salary gains as in 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.”

An employee who joined a company five years ago may have received annual raises, but a new hire entering the same role is being 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 they want a significant salary increase, as workers may find bigger salary gains by changing employers or moving into a higher-paying industry.

The report suggests that 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.

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

PaidHR’s sector data shows that 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 suggests that workers with similar skills may have very different earning prospects depending on the industries in which they work. 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. However, the 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. That means 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 the differences within individual companies suggest that it cannot be explained solely by men and women working in different industries.

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

PaidHR’s forecast projects that the middle salary could rise from ₦217,000 ($163.17) in 2026 to ₦380,000 ($285.73) by 2030, assuming annual salary growth of roughly 15%. Still, 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.

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Ask anyone who’s had to call for emergency help in Lagos what happened next, and you’ll get a version of the same story: a number that sometimes takes forever to connect, a dozen calls, and then a miraculous person with a car or who knows someone who does. Ambulances exist, but nothing coordinates them.

Medwaka’s founders ran into this problem from the other direction. They started out trying to solve blood donation shortages for pregnant women in Ondo State, and kept hitting the same wall: nobody could get from the point of distress to the point of care. So they rebuilt the company around solving that instead: a dispatch and coordination layer sitting on top of hospitals, ambulances, and first responders, which already existed individually.

And that right there is the part that’s easy to miss in a founder story. They weren’t just solving an ambulance shortage; they were fixing a coordination failure that a functioning public system should have solved decades ago.

*Image source: Precious Sunday/Big Cabal Media.*

It’s essentially the same pattern with money. Nigeria’s primary healthcare centres are chronically underfunded, and fixing that starts with how badly fiscal policy misses the people who need it most. Money gets budgeted, but is not always released. When it is, it may still fail to reach the facility level in ways that translate into patient care. TC Insights went looking for where people go when that happens and found an entire informal healthcare economy: patent medicine vendors, unlicensed clinics, and community-level caregivers quietly absorbing the patients the formal system was supposed to catch.

Donor money tells a similar story; the difference is that it is faster and more visible. In the past two decades, most of Nigeria’s health financing came from external partners. With government spending on health far below the African regional range of 2–12%, that dependency is not being treated as a problem to fix.

USAID pulling back in 2025 showed the healthtech sector in real time how much of its credibility and connective tissue had been running through one external pipe. We covered the impact of USAID leaving—not just money, but the partnerships that gave startups legitimacy with public health programmes. A second piece went further and found that disease surveillance systems themselves went dark when the funding line closed, as nobody had built a version of that infrastructure that didn’t depend on donor funding.

Issues like sex education, which even policy meetings skirt around, despite evidence of its importance, play a key role in understanding healthcare in Nigeria. Access to contraceptives is still gated by stigma more than by supply, sex education barely exists in Nigerian schools, and the question of who actually gets to decide what happens to a woman’s body in this country is still, functionally, not the woman. Whispa, a Nigerian digital platform providing young people with confidential and affordable access to sexual and reproductive healthcare, built its entire product around that gap years ago: anonymous, judgment-free access to sexual health information for girls who’d otherwise have nowhere to ask. But fundamental issues still exist.

Founders have routed around the problems, but they are not to blame, as it is almost impossible to innovate around a gap the government cannot address without the influence of foreign funds. A dispatch app doesn’t get Nigeria a functioning national emergency number. A femtech platform doesn’t get comprehensive sex education into the curriculum. What they’ve done, collectively, is leave a paper trail pointing to moments founders hit a wall the state should have removed, and that’s a more specific indictment than most policy critiques manage.

That paper trail is basically the whole argument of the health edition of The Nigerian Life Compendium, an initiative by Zikoko Citizen that’s less interested in health statistics for their own sake and more interested in naming, essay by essay, where the system hands its responsibilities to whoever’s left standing; usually families, sometimes founders, occasionally no one at all.