Only 80,000 Kenyans earn Sh. 100,000 and above monthly

Salaries in Kenya: Only 80,000 Kenyans earn a salary of Sh. 100,000 and above per month. This is according to a report on salaries in Kenya that was published in the Business Daily on Wednesday. The report showed that currently, 79,982 are in this pay scale.

“About 63.4 percent of men or 50,749 of them earned more than Sh100,000 compared to 29,233 women in this club, a gap of 21,516, which is roughly maintained in the other income bands. Three-quarters of Kenyans earn a monthly salary of below Sh50,000. Those paid between Sh20,000 and Sh29,999 per month, are represented in this group with a population of one million or 36.3 percent of the total salaried workforce of 2.7 million. It also includes the largest absolute number of employees of 781,964 with an income band ranging from Sh30,000 to Sh49,999 which can be considered the start of the lower middle class earnings threshold. This group has expanded the most in the past five years, adding 113,615 over the period,” says the report.

I sold family car, plot to raise capital; today I own Sh. 70 million business

It further says that:

The highest-paying jobs are concentrated in the private sector, which had 68,526 professionals or 85 percent of all the top earners.

Data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), set to be released next week, will show that top earners increased by 3,178 members with the 4.1 percent growth outpacing all the other income groups whose ranks rose by a range of 0.3 percent to 3.8 percent.

Those earning more than Sh100,000 accounted for 2.89 percent of the 2.70 million formal workers captured in the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) database.

At a minimum of Sh100,000, their pay is nearly six times the gross monthly per capita income of Sh16,833.

Nearly three quarters or 74.58 percent of formal sector workers earned below Sh50,000, reflecting the income inequality. The earnings inequality has partly been attributed to the previous centralised system of government, which guided sharing of resources since independence.