How much do you earn per second? Average pay in Ukraine, Poland, the UK and the US

The counters on this site divide an annual figure by the 31,536,000 seconds in a year. Applied to a salary, the same arithmetic gives numbers too small to picture: an average Ukrainian wage comes to about one kopiyka a second, and a typical full-time American earns about a fifth of a cent. This piece works through the official figures for four countries, what each of them actually measures, and what the rates can and cannot be used for.

Four countries, four figures

Ukraine. Derzhstat, the state statistics service, reported monthly average wages for full-time employees throughout 2025, from ₴22,992 in January to ₴30,926 in December. The average of the twelve months is ₴25,957.75, so a year of that pay is about ₴311,493 — roughly ₴0.0099 a second, just under one kopiyka.

Poland. GUS, the central statistical office, put the average gross wage in the national economy for 2025 at zł8,903.56 a month in its communiqué of 9 February 2026. Twelve months of that is zł106,842.72, or about zł0.0034 a second — a third of a grosz.

United Kingdom. The Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings put median gross annual earnings for full-time employees at £39,039 in April 2025. That is about £0.0012 a second, just over a tenth of a penny.

United States. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported median usual weekly earnings of $1,251 for full-time wage and salary workers in the second quarter of 2026. Multiplied by 52 weeks — our approximation, not a BLS figure — that is about $65,052 a year and $0.0021 a second.

In one currency

Converted at central bank rates for 29 September 2026 — 44.8153 hryvnias, 3.8537 zlotys and, by the European Central Bank's cross rate, 0.7549 pounds to the dollar — the four annual figures are about $6,951 for Ukraine, $27,725 for Poland, $51,715 for the UK and $65,052 for the US.

Per second that is roughly $0.00022, $0.00088, $0.0016 and $0.0021. The American figure is about nine times the Ukrainian one. Exchange rates, though, measure what a currency buys abroad, not at home: a hryvnia pays for more rent, food and transport in Kyiv than its dollar value would buy in Chicago, so the gap in living standards is smaller than the gap in dollars.

Why these four numbers are not quite comparable

Two of them are averages and two are medians. An average adds up all pay and divides by the number of people, so a small number of very high earners pulls it up; a median is the pay of the person in the middle. Where pay is unequal, the average sits above the median. The Ukrainian and Polish figures are averages; the British and American ones are medians. That flatters the first two relative to the last two.

They also cover different people. Derzhstat's monthly figure counts full-time staff at employers with ten or more employees, which leaves out smaller firms and the self-employed. The British and American figures cover full-time employees only. And the Ukrainian series has a December spike — pay rose 13.8% from November, as annual bonuses and year-end payments landed — which is why this piece uses the average of all twelve months rather than any single one.

Finally, all four are gross, before income tax and social contributions. For most Ukrainian employees, personal income tax of 18% and the military levy of 5% come out of the figure above, leaving about 77% of it. Deductions in the other three countries differ again.

Seconds of the year, or seconds at work

Dividing by every second in the year — nights, weekends and holidays included — is how the counters on this site work, and it is the fair way to compare a salary with a company's revenue or a government budget, which also accrue around the clock. It is not how pay feels. A full-time year of 40 hours a week for 52 weeks is 2,080 hours, about a quarter of all the hours in a year, so the rate per working second is a little over four times the rate per calendar second.

On a working-hour basis the four figures become about $3.34 an hour in Ukraine, $13.33 in Poland, $24.86 in the UK and $31.28 in the US. Actual hours worked vary by country and by job, so treat that as a way of seeing the scale rather than as an hourly wage.

Against the top of the scale

Forbes estimates that Cristiano Ronaldo earned $300 million in the twelve months to 1 May 2026, which this site shows as $9.51 a second. At that pace he earns the average Ukrainian annual wage in about twelve minutes, the Polish one in about 49 minutes, the British median in about an hour and a half, and the American median in just under two hours.

Turned around, a worker on the American median would need about 4,600 years to earn what Forbes credits Ronaldo with in one; on the Ukrainian average, about 43,000 years. Both figures are before tax, and the comparison inherits every caveat of both sources, but the scale it shows is not an artefact of the arithmetic.

To try your own salary, the compare-your-income tool on this site converts monthly pay into a per-second rate in any of six currencies and sets it beside the counters, and the time-to-buy tool turns it into hours of work for a given purchase.