About NetPayMap

NetPayMap is an independent reference site about the OECD tax wedge — the gap between what it costs to employ a worker and what that worker actually takes home. We map it for all 38 OECD countries, with full breakdowns of income tax, employee and employer social security, net take-home pay and family-type figures.

Why the tax wedge?

Most "tax by country" sites publish headline statutory rates — the top income-tax bracket, the standard VAT. Those rarely tell you what an ordinary worker actually loses, because they ignore social-security contributions, especially the employer contributions that inflate the cost of hiring without raising pay. The tax wedge is the OECD's answer to "how heavily is labour really taxed here?" — and it's the number we put front and centre.

What we publish

• A page for every OECD country with the full wedge breakdown and take-home pay.
• Rankings — highest and lowest wedge, highest employer social security, best net take-home.
• Country-vs-country comparisons for popular relocation and hiring matchups.
• A labour-cost to net-pay estimator and answer-first guides.

How we work

Every figure is real OECD Taxing Wages data (2023 data year), pulled once from the keyless OECD Data Explorer API and built into a static snapshot — no invented numbers. See our methodology for sources, derivations and limits. Source: OECD Taxing Wages (CC BY 4.0).

Contact

Questions or corrections? Get in touch.