Wealth inequality
How long you have to work to earn what the largest counters on this site earn in a single second.
Enter your monthly salary. We'll show how long it takes you to earn what each person or company earns in a single second.
Reading the comparison honestly
For each counter, the tool takes one second of its annualised pace and asks how long you would work to earn that much. The annual figures come from the same records as the entity pages, each with a named publisher, document and period, so the number on the other side is one you can verify rather than take on trust.
The caveat matters more here than in the other tools. A second of company revenue is not a second of anyone's pay — it is a gross top line that funds salaries, suppliers, tax and investment. A second of a government's spending line is money leaving a budget, not arriving in a pocket. Only the individual counters are pay in any recognisable sense, and even those are pre-tax estimates that blend contracts with endorsements.
What the comparison does show is the distance between the scales at which money moves. Whether that distance is the right thing to call inequality is a question this page does not try to settle; the arithmetic is here so the argument can start from a number.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which entities does it use?
A fixed set of counters whose annual figures carry a source citation. Entities whose figures we cannot trace to a named document are excluded from this tool.
Is this net worth or income?
Neither, uniformly. Company counters use revenue, government counters use spending or debt growth, and individual counters use published earnings estimates. Each entity page states which.
Why one second?
Because it is the smallest unit the counters display, and because the answer for a full-time wage is usually measured in days or weeks — a ratio that annual totals hide completely.