Salary growth has slowed sharply across the Irish labour market, with median permanent salary movement largely flat to 2%, according to a new report from recruitment firm Morgan McKinley.
Its Irish Salary Guide found that while employers are continuing to hire, they are doing so with tight control over headcount and reserving salary premiums only for skills that are genuinely critical to delivery or risk management.
According to the report, businesses are under pressure to deliver digital transformation, meet regulatory and compliance obligations, and manage leaner operating models at the same time as controlling costs.
Broad salary increases have been replaced by highly targeted investment in specialist capability and a growing reliance on contract, fixed-term, and fractional professionals, the study found.
The guide shows that meaningful salary growth is now concentrated in a narrow set of specialist disciplines, including advanced technology, cyber and data governance, as well as regulatory risk and compliance.
"Outside these areas, salary growth has effectively stalled," the report found.
"Instead, employers are competing on flexibility, hybrid working models, benefits and job security, career pathways, and role scope, with clarity of purpose and quality of leadership emerging as decisive attraction and retention factors," it added.
Global FDI Director at Morgan McKinley Trayc Keevans, said the findings reflect a labour market that is still active but far more disciplined.
"Demand remains strong where skills directly enable transformation, regulatory compliance, or operational continuity, but organisations are no longer responding by expanding teams or lifting salaries across the board," Ms Keevans said.
"Instead, we are seeing entirely new, more narrowly defined roles enter the market, including AI auditors, ESG data governance leads, cyber and operational resilience specialists, and regulatory transformation programme managers, as employers target very specific capability gaps that did not exist at scale even two years ago," she added.
