Income inequality in Argentina improved slightly at the end of the year, though the gap between the richest and the poorest remains substantial.
Nationwide, the richest 10 percent of the population earns around 13 times more than the poorest 10 percent, according to new data from the INDEC national statistics bureau.
While the bureau’s ‘Evolution of the distribution of income’ report, based on the Permanent Survey of Households (EPH, in its Spanish acronym), showed a scenario of relative stability in levels of income inequality, there are marked disparities according to gender and whether a citizen is in formal employment.
Argentina’s Gini coefficient – an internationally recognised statistical measure of economic inequality, typically measuring income or wealth distribution across a population on a scale from 0 to 1 – measured 0.427 for the final quarter of 2025, slightly down from the 0.43 registered for the same period of 2024.
INDEC’s number-crunching shows that the income gap between the highest and lowest tenths of the population remained at 13 times when analysing the mean per capita family income, equal to the same quarter in 2024.
The sum total of income for the total reference population was just over 19.1 trillion pesos, signifying a nominal increase of 44.9 percent in relation to the same quarter in 2024. According to the report, 62.6 percent of the population received some kind of income during the period analysed, with an individual average working out to 1,011,863 pesos (around US$730 at the official exchange rate).
Analysed according to the scale of individual earnings, the average income of the bottom four-tenths of the population was 351,028 pesos and 2,476,247 pesos for the top two-tenths, with the four tenths in between averaging 940,586 pesos.
The average per capita income of the total population measured, some 30 million people, reached 635,996 pesos while mean per capita income was 450,000 pesos.
INDEC’s report shows that Argentina’s job market continues to show great disparity. Wage-earners making pension contributions averaged a salary of 1,321,353 pesos, while for the informally employed, the figure fell drastically to 651,484 pesos.
Gender inequality also remains present. Males averaged an income of 1,191,364 pesos as against 838,336 for women. As for main jobs, the gender income gap is 29.6 percent in favour of men.
Looking at the composition of the earnings of Argentine families, the report reveals that 79.2 percent of household income comes from employment, with the remaining 20.8 percent from other sources (pensions, subsidies, rents, etc.).
Nevertheless, the dependence of households in the lowest-income tenth on external aid is critical: earnings other than employment represent 67.7 percent of their total while only 12.3 percent for the top tenth.
Relationships of dependence show, on average, 122 unemployed persons for every 100 employed in the total of 31 urban agglomerations surveyed. The pressure is much greater in vulnerable sectors, where in the lowest tenth the figure rises to 284 unemployed people for every 100 employed.
– TIMES/NA
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