The average earnings of an information and communication technology (ICT) manager in Australia dropped in 2025 while wages in other key industry roles continued to rise, new Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show.

Full-time ICT managers earned an average of $3,402 per week before tax in May 2025, or around $177,000 per year, according to data released last month.

That was around $180 less per week than such managers were earning in May 2023, when they were paid an average of $3,584 (or $186,000 per year), according to previous ABS data.

ICT managers were defined by the ABS as those who “plan, organise, direct, control, and coordinate the acquisition, development, maintenance, and use of computer and telecommunication systems within organisations”.

The bureau’s statistics on employee earnings do not include executives or high-level managers who have strategic responsibilities or oversee a significant number of employees.

‘Companies stopped paying people just to watch others work’

Ellis Taylor, director of Australian technology recruitment agency Real Time, said ICT manager salaries dipped in 2024 and 2025 because of a “middle management squeeze” which has continued to accelerate in 2026.

“Basically, companies stopped paying people just to watch others work,” he told Information Age.

“Because artificial intelligence has accelerated competition, we need builders, not managers.”

The ICT job market has been “flooded with senior leaders” since layoffs in late 2023 and 2024 saw “a massive delayering across the sector”, Taylor added.

“Many had to take ‘step-down’ roles to re-enter the workforce, pulling the average [salary] down,” he said.

“… Overall, the market has shifted from valuing coordination to valuing execution.

“If you can fix the breach, build the app, or secure the database, your value is going up.

“If you just manage the people doing that, not so much – and this trend is only accelerating.”

Men still paid more in some ICT roles – but not all

Both male and female ICT managers were paid the same average weekly wage in 2025, according to the latest ABS data.

However, men were still paid around 18 per cent more than women in database or systems administrators and ICT security specialist roles, and around 7 per cent more in ICT and telecommunications technician roles.

ICT and telecommunications technicians were defined as those who “provide support to the development and maintenance of computer infrastructure, web technology and telecommunications networks, and the diagnosis and resolution of technical problems”.

Of the four key ICT roles collated in the ABS data, women only earned more than men when employed as ICT network and support professionals, in which they earned around 4 per cent more than their male counterparts.

Workers in such roles “research, analyse, plan, design, install, monitor, and maintain ICT systems to support the business needs of organisations and individuals”, according to the ABS definition.

Sean Crick, head of labour statistics at the ABS, said in January that Australia’s overall gender pay gap for hourly earnings had narrowed by 0.5 percentage points over the last two years, to 8.4 per cent as of May 2025.

"Hourly earnings were $47.90 overall, with males earning an average of $50.20 and females $46,” he said in a statement.

ICT pays more than economy average, for fewer hours worked

Despite the recent dip in ICT manager salaries, data from the ABS's four latest surveys of employee earnings and hours largely showed wage growth across ICT roles.

The average full-time ICT worker earned $2,577 per week (or around $134,000 per year) before tax in 2025 for an average of 38 hours worked, according to the ABS data.

That was 25 per cent higher than the average across the agency's sample of 50,000 occupations, which found the average worker across all surveyed industries earned $2,061 per week (or around $107,000 per year) before tax for 39.2 hours worked.

“Distributional data showed that someone earning more than $2,122 a week was in the highest paid quarter of employees in May 2025,” said Crick from the ABS.

“Someone earning less than $878 per week was in the lowest quarter for the same period.”

The only ICT role in the ABS data with a salary below the national average was that of an ICT and telecommunications technician, who earned an average of $1,863 per week for 37.9 hours worked in 2025, or around $97,000 per year.

Such technicians, as well as ICT network and support professionals, also both reported working slightly longer hours in May 2023, before their hours later reduced.

Technology recruiter Ellis Taylor said this workload spike in 2023 largely reflected the “cyber cleanup” required following major data breaches at the likes of Optus and Medibank in late 2022.

“The grunt work – patching thousands of endpoints, resetting millions of IDs, and hardening firewalls – fell squarely on the shoulders of technicians and support pros throughout 2023,” he said.

Many companies also implemented hiring freezes in 2023, but Taylor said “the work didn’t stop”.

“Teams shrank – attrition without backfill – so the remaining support staff had to absorb the workload of their departed colleagues,” he said.

ABS data released earlier this month showed wages across the Australian economy have not kept up with inflation.

The Wage Price Index (WPI) rose 3.4 per cent for the 12 months to December 2025 – a slower rate than inflation, which rose 3.8 per cent in the same period.