// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Are salaries getting worse? Many scientists think so
Linda Nordling is a freelance journalist in Cape Town, South Africa.
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This article is the second in a series discussing the results of Nature’s 2026 science-job satisfaction survey. It’s the latest edition of such surveys, which started in 2010; the last two took place in 2018 and 2021. The 2026 survey, created in partnership with Thinks Insight & Strategy, a research consultancy in London, launched in May and was advertised on nature.com, in Springer Nature digital products and through e-mail campaigns. It had 3,882 self-selecting respondents across 133 countries with 31% describing themselves as female and 19% as belonging to a minority ethnic group in their country of work. The full survey data sets are available at go.nature.com/4b2drrc.
Umar, a mathematics lecturer in northern Nigeria, has worked at his university for more than ten years. In that time, he’s had only one pay rise: in 2024, when the government raised the national minimum wage. With no inflation- or promotion-based adjustments, his income no longer covers his basic living costs. Instead, he has to borrow money, take on extra jobs and cut back on essential spending. “Unfortunately, my experience is not an isolated one” for Nigerian scientists, he says.
On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Ashley — an early-career physicist employed on a fixed-term contract in a university in the eastern United States — says she is much worse off than her parents, neither of whom have degrees. “It’s really messed up that I have a job that requires a PhD in science, yet I’m paid US$20,000 less per year than my father earned at his job 20 years ago, before accounting for inflation.” Ashley lists the things she can’t afford, including children (her pay won’t cover childcare, nor putting them through university) and home ownership. She thinks she did everything ‘right’ — for example, having jobs alongside her undergraduate studies to avoid debt. “Yet I am still locked out of the middle-class existence I have worked myself half to death for,” she says, adding: “It sucks. It really, really sucks.”
Umar and Ashley (not their real names) live in countries with vastly different resources for research and costs of living. But their stories reflect a global theme. When Nature’s careers team surveyed them and nearly 4,000 other scientists earlier this year about their salaries, less than half said they had received a pay rise in the past 12 months. Around one-third said that their salaries covered only basic expenses, and one in ten said their income failed to do even that.
The survey asked respondents to convert their gross (before-taxes) salary into US dollars, then choose the range into which it falls. More than half earn less than US$50,000 a year, and 22% make at least $80,000. In 2021, when Nature last ran this survey, 38% earned below $50,000 and 32% earned $80,000 or more. But this apparent drop in global salaries might be because of geographical shifts in those surveyed — particularly a rise in respondents from Asia, who made up 10% in 2021 and 39% this year. From continents with enough respondents for comparison, North American scientists earn the most, followed by those in Europe, then Asia (see ‘The scientist’s wallet’).
Industry salaries exceed those in academia by 66%, and more scientists in industry are satisfied with their salary (58%) than are those in academia (43%). But even in the private sector, some think that they should earn more. “It feels like I’m making less and less every year,” says a researcher working at a biomedical technology company in a large city in the midwestern United States, who, like many scientists Nature spoke to, asked to remain anonymous when discussing pay concerns.
She moved from working at a university to her current job four years ago after discovering that she was pregnant, because she judged childcare expenses to