Western Australians remain the country's most highly paid workers with the state's average annual wage rising 7.2 per cent, new figures show.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics said today that Western Australians on average earn $69,435 a year, higher than the national average wage of $63,788.
WA beat New South Wales where the average annual wage is $64,729 while Queenslanders earn an average $63,102 a year.
The highest average wage is still in the mining sector at $101,150 a year, followed by information media and telecommunications ($75,374), scientific and technical services ($75,561) and finance and insurance services ($73,996).
The lowest average wage is obtained by workers in the accommodation and food services sector ($46,503), followed by retail trade ($48,438) and "other services" ($51,522).
Nationally, the quarterly seasonally-adjusted pace of average weekly ordinary time earnings (AWOTE) rose 2.0 per cent in the three months to November, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data released on Thursday showed.
This was a sharp acceleration on the 0.9 per cent quarterly growth recorded in the three months to August, lifting the annual rate well above the Reserve Bank of Australia's perceived "line in the sand" at 4.5 per cent.
Still, the composition of the AWOTE series tends to make it volatile, which is why the RBA prefers to use the wage price index - released yesterday - as one of its main guides to wages growth.
That index showed growth of just 0.6 per cent in the three months to December with the annual rate slipping to 2.9 per cent, a nine-year low.
