Indigenous wages are described as the single largest economic contribution First Nations people make to Australia.
What’s happening: Indigenous Business Australia and the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Indigenous People and Work have announced a research partnership to calculate and analyse the pay gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
Why this matters: According to the 2021 Census, Indigenous Australians aged 15 to 64 had an employment rate of 52%, compared with 75% for non-Indigenous Australians.
Australia has had a national gender pay gap report since 2014. It has no equivalent for Indigenous workers.
That is what Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) and the University of Technology Sydney’s Centre for Indigenous People and Work (CIPW) are setting out to fix. The two organisations announced a formal research partnership in late February 2026, with the specific goal of calculating and analysing the pay gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians for the first time.
The joint research will build on existing data from Jobs and Skills Australia and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, including the Skills Tracker linked dataset, which connects census records, tax office data, social services information and tertiary education records to generate detailed income estimates. Findings are targeted for release later in 2026.
Professor Nareen Young, Associate Dean (Indigenous Leadership and Engagement) at UTS Business School and lead researcher at CIPW, was direct about what she expects the research to show.
“We know that Indigenous wages matter, not just for individual workers, but for families, communities, and the economy as a whole,” Professor Young said. “By measuring the Indigenous pay gap, we can clearly show how fair pay translates into higher lifetime earnings, stronger superannuation outcomes, and greater intergenerational economic security for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.”
Wages as economic engine
The partnership rests on a premise that challenges a common framing of Indigenous economic participation: that employment in the mainstream labour market, not business ownership alone, is where the largest contribution is made and where the most significant inequity sits.
Sean Armistead, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of IBA, put it plainly. “Supporting Indigenous entrepreneurship remains vital, and so is ensuring Indigenous people are fairly paid for their work across the wider labour market. Because that is the largest single contribution that First Nations people make to the economy,” Mr Armistead said.
“This research aligns with IBA’s Strategy Towards 2030 by strengthening the evidence base needed to expand economic opportunity, financial independence, and long-term prosperity for our communities.”
The research will also examine what both organisations describe as the demographic dividend of a growing and increasingly educated First Nations workforce, and the potential economic returns from addressing pay inequity at scale.
According to AIHW analysis of the 2021 Census, the median gross weekly household income for Indigenous adults was $825, compared with $1,141 for non-Indigenous adults, a gap of $316. That gap has narrowed since 2011, when it stood at $379, but remains substantial.
What the current data does not isolate, and what this research is designed to address, is how much of that income gap is driven specifically by lower wages among employed Indigenous workers, rather than by lower rates of employment overall.
Beyond business ownership
The announcement is explicit that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have always sought to participate in the broader labour market, and that they have done so despite what it describes as active societal and market exclusion.
In 2021, just over 10% of Indigenous Australians aged 15 to 64 were employed in the public sector, while 41% were employed in the private sector, according to Census data analysed by the AIHW. The majority of economic contribution from First Nations workers therefore flows through mainstream private-sector employment, the sector where the pay gap is also likely to be widest.
The AIHW has noted that the lack of regular data collections on First Nations income and financial stress makes it difficult to track changes over time, and that linked data assets could help fill this gap. The new IBA and CIPW partnership is a direct response to that limitation.
The broader context for this work sits inside Australia’s ongoing pay equity conversation. As Dynamic Business has reported, even Australia’s gender pay gap, which has been tracked and publicly reported for years, is not projected to close until 2054 without committed action. For the Indigenous pay gap, that clock has not yet started because the baseline has not been established.
What a number could change
The initiative is described as Indigenous-led, and it is explicitly designed to do more than produce a statistic. Its stated purpose is to generate the evidence base required for systemic reform in employment, economic policy and Indigenous wages.
The research will use the Skills Tracker dataset developed jointly by Jobs and Skills Australia and the ABS, a Multi-Agency Data Integration Project linking Census, Department of Social Services, Australian Taxation Office, and tertiary education data, using records up to May 2022 to analyse labour market participation and employment pathways for First Nations people. The new partnership will extend that analysis specifically to income and pay equity.
Australia’s approach to pay gap reporting has been evolving, with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency beginning to publish private-sector gender pay gap data by employer in 2024. Whether a similar transparency framework might eventually apply to Indigenous pay equity will depend partly on whether the evidence base this research aims to build is compelling enough to drive that kind of policy response.
For Professor Young and Mr Armistead, the goal is to make that case with data that is rigorous, specific and impossible to ignore.
“By measuring the Indigenous pay gap, we can clearly show how fair pay translates into higher lifetime earnings, stronger superannuation outcomes, and greater intergenerational economic security for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people,” Professor Young said.
The findings are expected later this year.
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