How much bitcoin did a month's salary buy?
With each country's average salary and each year's average bitcoin price. No projections: these are the salaries and prices that actually existed.
A month of average salary, country by country
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Tap a country to see how it changed
Log scale: each line is worth 10 times the one below.
Your salary
Enter how much you earn per month. It's calculated here, in your browser: the number isn't saved or sent anywhere.
Today, your salary buys
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The same salary, in each year
| Year | In dollars | Average price | Bought |
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It's the same amount, in your currency, in every year: it doesn't account for raises or inflation. It answers "how much bitcoin this amount of money bought", not "how much I earned".
How it's calculated
Each year's bitcoin price is the average of its daily prices. A month's salary is the country's average annual salary divided by 12, converted to dollars at that year's average exchange rate. What it bought is that month's salary divided by the price. Small amounts are shown in satoshis (sats): 1 BTC is 100 million sats. They're shown with three digits, because salary and price are averages for the whole year.
The average salary is the one published by the OECD: gross salary, before taxes, per full-time employee, with the same method in every country. The latest published year is 2025 (2023 for Chile). China, Argentina and Brazil aren't included because they aren't OECD members.
Chile appears from 2018. That year it changed the source it uses to measure employment, and its series shows a drop in salaries that didn't happen: it's a change in measurement. Figures before 2018 can't be compared with those after.
The US minimum wage is the federal one ($7.25 an hour since 2009), for a full-time month: 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, divided by 12.
Bitcoin prices start on July 18, 2010: the 2010 average covers only that part of the year. Back then there was hardly anywhere to buy bitcoin, so treat it as a theoretical exercise.
Sources: prices from Coin Metrics Community Data (the same as in "One dollar a day"); average annual salary from the OECD (Average annual wages); minimum wage from the US Department of Labor; monthly exchange rates from the Federal Reserve and, for the Chilean peso, from the OECD (all via FRED).
Educational content. This is not investment advice, and past results don't guarantee future results.