Almost half of Nigerian workers earn less than $150 monthly, report finds

46 out of every 100 Nigerian workers earn below ₦200,000 ($150) monthly, according to a new salary report by PaidHR , a Nigerian human resources and payroll startup. The report offers a visual of what employers pay employees in Nigeria’s formal labour market. PaidHR said it analysed payroll records for more than 25,000 workers across over 400 Nigerian employers, using a July 2026 snapshot of active employees on its platform. The findings show a wide gap between the lower and upper ends of the salary scale. Of every 100 workers in the dataset, 46 earn below ₦200,000 ($150) a month, while 10 earn at least ₦1 million ($751.93). “The shape of the distribution suggests that Nigeria’s formal workforce is not one evenly distributed middle class; it is increasingly a two-tier labour market,” Seye Bandele, PaidHR’s co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCabal in an interview. “A large group is clustered around relatively low wages, alongside a much smaller professional group earning substantially more.” Nigeria’s labour force participation rate rose to 79.5% in Q2 2024 , and formal employment accounts for about 7.0% to 7.3% of the total employed workforce. However, only a fraction