This annual publication provides details of taxes paid on wages in all thirty member countries of the OECD.* The information contained in the Report covers the personal income tax and social security contributions paid by employees and their employers and cash benefits received by families. The objective of the Report is to illustrate how personal income taxes and social security contributions are calculated and to examine how these levies and cash family benefits impact on net household incomes. The results also allow quantitative cross-country comparisons of labour cost levels and of the overall tax and benefit position of single persons and families.

This Report provides unique information for each of the OECD countries on the income taxes paid by workers, their social security contributions, the family benefits they receive in the form of cash transfers as well as the social security contributions and payroll taxes paid by their employers. Results reported include the marginal and average tax burden for one- and two-earner families, and the implied total labour costs for employers. These data are widely used in academic research and in the formulation and evaluation of social and economic policies. The taxpayer specific detail in this Report enables it to complement the information provided annually in the Revenue Statistics, a publication providing internationally comparative data on tax levels and tax structures in the thirty member countries. The methodology followed in this Report is set out briefly in Section 1 and described in more detail in Part IV of this Report.

This Special Feature has been prepared by Bert Brys; it has benefited from comments by Maurice Nettley, Stéphane Buydens and Alastair Thomas. The modelling of the NTCPs in the Taxing Wages country calculation files was undertaken by Bert Brys and Alastair Thomas. This Special Feature also draws on input from Delegates to the Working Party No. 2 on Tax Policy Analysis and Tax Statistics of the Committee on Fiscal Affairs.