Is your pay rise actually fair?
A 4% pay rise sounds great — until you realise CPI was 4.5% and you're going backwards in real purchasing power. The two ABS benchmarks worth knowing for assessing fairness: Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the cost of a basket of household goods and services (your purchasing power); and Wage Price Index (WPI), which measures what the average Australian worker is actually getting in pay rises (your competitive position).
Recent quarters have had Australian CPI running 3.5-4.5% and WPI 3.5-4.0%. So a fair maintenance-only raise tracks both — about 4% per year. Anything below CPI is a real-terms pay cut. Anything below WPI means peers are pulling ahead. A genuinely above-market raise (3-4 percentage points above WPI in a single year) signals real outperformance recognition or a job-market correction. Anything below 1.5x CPI usually warrants a conversation with your manager or a market-test in the job market.
The calculator above takes your last-review salary and current salary, normalises to an annualised rate, and compares against CPI and WPI benchmarks. Use the latest ABS quarterly numbers (released February, May, August, November) for the most current values. For job-market comparison see our Income Percentile Calculator or Salary Comparison Calculator.