When retail is folded in, Apple pays employees less than Google or Microsoft

A new examination of salaries across the Standard and Poor (S&P) measure of 500 large US firms, says Apple pays less than its rivals — but only when its enormous, worldwide retail staff are included.

It's possible to compare the salaries that two people doing the same job get, as evidenced by how Apple has been revealed to pay women 6% less than men. It's not, though, possible to make definitive overall comparisons between companies because their constituent parts are so different.

Consequently, while the Wall Street Journal has attempted a comparison between large US firms, it notes that it cannot usefully calculate an average. The mean or average pay earned at Apple or Google, for instance, is meaningless since there will be extremely high earners like Tim Cook on the board, and $22 per hour retail workers in the same list.

Nor can directly comparisons be made between, for instance, Google and Apple, since the latter has a large retail staff, which is also deployed across the world.

Given these issues, the Wall Street Journal has nonetheless attempted to draw some conclusions from the salary data it has gathered. It has done so by counting all of the different salary levels, and taken the median. In theory, this approach takes account only of how many different salary levels are above or below it, but there is only one CEO position and several dozen different categorizations of retail personnel.

By this measure, Apple's median salary for 2021 was $68,254, which the publication says is up 18% on the previous year. It also notes that Apple has approximately 154,000 employees including retail operations.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Alphabet, which owns Google, has a very similar number of employees at 156,600. However, its median pay is the much greater $295,884, which is reportedly a rise of 8% in the last year.

For comparison, Facebook's 2021 median salary was up 11% to $292,785 across its 71,970 employees. And Twitter's was $232,626, up 13% for its 7,500 employees.

"Google parent Alphabet Inc... and Facebook's... Meta Platforms Inc. had the highest-paid median workers, at almost $300,000," says the Wall Street Journal. "They were among nearly 150 companies that said their median employee earned more than $100,000."

S&P tracks data concerning 500 large firms in the US, and that does include Microsoft. However, the Wall Street Journal was seemingly unable to collate salary data for Microsoft, as it isn't included in the publication's comparisons.