Advertised salaries on job board Seek Australia increased by 4.4% in the year to the February 2024.

The Seek Advertised Salary Index (ASI) measures the growth in advertised salaries for jobs posted on Seek in Australia. The Index noted that the 4.4% rise was higher than the inflation rate. 

Advertised salaries rose over the month by 0.2% for the second consecutive month in February, slowing the quarterly rate of growth to 0.7%.

Seek Senior Economist, Matt Cowgill said, “It looks increasingly clear that wages growth in Australia has peaked. The labour market has cooled, and application levels are quite high, so employers no longer have to compete quite as fiercely for talent as in 2022.”

“In the past three months, the Seek ASI is up just 0.7%, which, if it continued at this pace for a full year, would see year-on-year growth at around three per cent, the slowest rate of growth recorded since before the pandemic,” Cowgill said. “For now, we’re in a sweet spot where advertised salaries are growing faster than inflation, so workers are no longer going backwards, but they’re seemingly not growing so fast that they threaten to push inflation back up.”

Seek recently published data which showed job ad volumes are down 18.6% year-on-year in February 2024.