Ireland is the rare case where the survey and the tax data are run by different bodies and you genuinely need both. The HEA Graduate Outcomes Survey reaches every graduate nine months out — the Class of 2024 covered about 71,000 graduates at a 50.9 percent response rate, including 25,059 taught-postgraduate (master’s-level) graduates. It is excellent on employment and contracts but reports pay only in bands. For an actual median you go to the CSO, which links graduate records to Revenue tax data.
Employment and contracts: strong, and unusually well-documented
The master’s picture is good. Among taught-postgraduate graduates of the Class of 2024, 86.6 percent were in employment nine months out and 59.7 percent were in professional occupations — well above the 80.2 percent employment rate across all graduates. And Ireland gives you something most countries don’t: a contract figure. 71.2 percent of taught-postgraduate graduates were on a permanent or open-ended contract nine months out, one of the higher contract-security numbers in this series and one of the few published for master’s graduates anywhere.
What it pays — bands first, then the real median
The HEA reports pay in bands rather than a median. For taught-postgraduate graduates who disclosed a salary, 62.4 percent earned more than €40,000 nine months out and 13 percent earned more than €80,000. To turn that into a median you switch to the CSO’s tax-linked data, which puts median graduate earnings at about €625 gross per week one year out — roughly €32,000–33,000 a year — and higher at master’s level. One honesty note: the CSO publishes the “Business, administration and law” field figure only inside its data tables, not its headline release, and the master’s-specific (NFQ Level 9) weekly figure isn’t itemised for the latest cohort, so the field-level median takes some digging.
The slope is the selling point
A starting salary is one data point; the trajectory is the story. The CSO’s tax data for an earlier cohort shows median gross weekly earnings climbing from about €430 one year out to €735 at five years and €1,090 at ten — and master’s and doctoral graduates (NFQ Levels 9 and 10) recorded the largest gains of any level. That is the compounding a postgraduate qualification buys in Ireland: the first job is solid, the curve is steep.
The gender gap, from tax records
Because the earnings come from tax data, the gender gap is measured rather than self-reported. One year out, men earned a median €635 per week versus €615 for women — a €20 weekly gap that is narrow at entry but, as everywhere, widens with time: for an earlier cohort it reached about €170 a week by ten years out.
What the Irish data doesn’t break out
Two honest limits. The HEA’s sector split is reported for all postgraduates combined, not for the taught-master’s cohort specifically, and its geography figures — share staying in Ireland, Dublin concentration — are for undergraduate graduates, not master’s. So while you can say a great deal about Irish master’s employment, contracts and pay, you cannot cleanly say which industries or which cities the master’s cohort lands in from the published releases.
How to read this for your own decision
An Irish MiM offers one of the better-documented outcome pictures in Europe: high employment, a genuine permanent-contract figure (the thing the UK can’t give you), salary bands plus a tax-based median, and a steep earnings curve over a decade. The gaps are sector and geographic detail at the master’s level — present in the data, just not in the public releases.
For the live, school-by-school version, the MiM careers page for Ireland tracks each program’s outcomes and the Stamp 1G graduate work rules. Read it next to the UK tax-record data — the other English-speaking market — and the French CGE breakdown. If you are still deciding whether the degree pays off, is the MiM worth it in 2026 covers the math.
Sources: Higher Education Authority, “Graduate Outcomes Survey — Class of 2024” (nine months after graduation; salary reported in bands). Central Statistics Office, “Higher Education Outcomes — What Graduates Earn” (graduation years 2013–2022), median gross weekly earnings from Revenue records. HEA salary bands are self-reported; CSO earnings are gross weekly from tax data.