Make an international salary comparison make sense
Start with the question behind the number: what a salary buys after tax, how purchasing power changes the comparison, and which tax rules actually apply to a cross-border decision.
PlainGlobalPay's guides translate named OECD datasets and official tax materials into a source-linked explanation before you compare a country, ranking, or salary scenario. Check the methodology for the dataset boundaries and refresh process.
Choose a starting point
What are you trying to compare?
A salary offer
Compare take-home pay across countries
Use PPP, tax, and household assumptions before treating two gross-salary figures as equivalent.
A country shortlist
Read a tax ranking in context
See why a low income-tax rate is only one part of a worker's real take-home position.
A policy change
Understand the rule before the headline
Get the vocabulary, scope, and source trail for OECD Pillar Two before applying it to a decision.
All guides
Each guide answers one source-checkable question.
How to Compare International Salaries: The Complete PPP Guide
A step-by-step guide to comparing salaries across countries using purchasing power parity. Learn why a $100,000 salary in the US, Germany, and Portugal delivers very different lifestyles.
Which OECD Countries Have the Lowest Income Tax? 2025 Rankings
A data-driven ranking of the 38 OECD countries by effective income tax burden, tax wedge, and real take-home purchasing power. Hungary, Estonia, and Chile lead, but it is more complicated than that.
Understanding OECD Pillar Two: The 15% Global Minimum Tax Explained
What the OECD Pillar Two global minimum tax means for individuals, corporations, and the countries they operate in.
Understanding Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)
What PPP means for international salary comparisons and why nominal exchange rates are misleading.
What Is the Tax Wedge and Why It Matters
The gap between gross salary and take-home pay varies from 20% to 50%+ across OECD countries.
Evaluating an Expat Job Offer: A Data Framework
How to compare cross-border compensation using tax, PPP, and benefit data.
Understanding Employer Costs Across Countries
Why your salary is not what your employer pays, mandatory contributions add 20-40% in many countries.
Methodology
Our guides are based on publicly available OECD data, official tax materials, and other named source publications. All statistics, ratings, and figures cited in these guides are drawn directly from source publications, with sources clearly referenced throughout.
We aim to present complex government data in plain language that is accessible to general audiences. When methodologies differ between data sources or change over time, we note these variations inline. Our editorial process includes regular reviews to ensure accuracy and timeliness of the information presented.
Why PlainGlobalPay Publishes Guides
Public datasets are rarely self-explanatory. Codes, thresholds, and regulatory terminology can obscure the decision a reader is trying to make. Our editorial process writes guides to explain those details in plain English and links the source material so readers can check the interpretation for themselves.
What You Will Find Here
Every guide focuses on a single, researchable question, usually something a visitor might type into a search engine. We cite the original source wherever we state a specific regulatory threshold, dollar figure, date, or fact-about-the-world. We do not invent numbers, do not quote unreliable secondary sources, and do not paraphrase source material so aggressively that its meaning shifts. If you notice a factual drift or a sentence where our summary disagrees with the linked source, email the correction and we will update the guide.
Guides Are Not Professional Advice
Reading a guide is a useful first step: it explains the vocabulary, process, and known edge cases. It is not a substitute for a licensed professional or advice tailored to an individual situation. Use it to understand the source material and form better questions for a qualified advisor.
How We Decide What to Write
We pick guide topics by looking at real visitor questions, search queries that land on the site without a good destination, emails from readers asking for explainers, and patterns in the data that deserve a sustained write-up. We favor topics where a short, honest, well-cited guide genuinely helps over topics that merely drive traffic. When we get a topic wrong, we correct it and note the update; when we get feedback that a guide missed an angle, we add a section rather than rewriting from scratch.