Norway answers the salary question in two halves, from two official bodies. NIFU’s Kandidatundersøkelsen surveys new master’s graduates about six months out and tells you about jobs and job fit; SSB’s register tells you about pay. I focused on economics-administration (økonomisk-administrative fag), the closest field to a Master in Management. Two caveats first: NIFU’s survey excludes BI Norwegian Business School, the country’s largest business school, and Norway publishes no permanent-contract figure for new graduates.
What it pays: near the top of the table
This is the strong part of the Norwegian story. SSB’s starting-salary ranking puts an economics-administration master’s at 64,970 kroner gross per month — about 780,000 kroner a year — in 2024. That is second only to medicine (71,380) across master’s fields, ahead of nursing, engineering, IT and law. For a discipline that isn’t a regulated profession, sitting that high on the pay ranking is a genuine selling point.
The jobs picture: solid pay, a softening market
The employment side is more cautious, and 2025 was the year it turned. Overall unemployment among new master’s graduates was 9.5 percent six months out — up three points from 2023, the survey’s headline. By field:
| Field, ~6 months out | Unemployment |
|---|---|
| Law, health, teaching | ~3% |
| Technology | 8% |
| Economics-administration | 12% |
| Humanities | 15% |
| Social sciences | 15% |
| Natural sciences | 21% |
Economics-administration sits in the intermediate band — comfortably better than the disciplinary fields, clearly behind the regulated professions — and it was one of the fields where unemployment rose most between 2023 and 2025. The pay is excellent; the entry market cooled.
Job fit: the part economics does well
Norway measures something most countries don’t: mistilpasning, or mismatch, which bundles unemployment, involuntary part-time work, overeducation and content-mismatch into one picture. The standout finding is that overeducation is largely transitional — about 30 percent of new master’s graduates are overeducated for their job at six months, falling to roughly 18 percent six to seven years out as careers settle.
Economics-administration does comparatively well here: it sits at the low end for overeducation and content-mismatch, grouped with law and technology as the least exposed to poor job fit. In other words, when economics graduates are employed, the work tends to match the qualification — their one weak spot is the cyclical rise in unemployment, not the quality of the jobs. Across all fields, about one in three employed new graduates is in a temporary position lasting more than six months, which is as close to a contract figure as Norway gives you.
What Norway doesn’t publish
Be clear about the limits. There is no gender pay gap for new graduates in either the NIFU or SSB release — the only sex-related figure is that involuntary part-timers are mostly women, except in the humanities. SSB’s salary figure is a 2024 snapshot with no trajectory, so unlike the UK or Ireland you can’t show a five- or ten-year curve. And the BI exclusion matters for a business-school benchmark specifically — a large slice of Norway’s management graduates simply isn’t in the NIFU numbers.
How to read this for your own decision
A Norwegian MiM, in the economics-administration track, buys you one of the highest starting salaries in this series — second only to medicine in the national ranking — and good job fit when you land a role. The honest counterweight is a market that got tighter in 2025 (12 percent unemployment for the field at six months) and a thinner data picture than France or the UK: no contract rate, no gender split, no salary trajectory.
For the live, school-by-school version, the MiM careers page for Norway tracks each program’s outcomes and the job-seeker visa rules. Read it next to the Dutch alumni-survey data, the other high-pay Northern-European 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: NIFU, “Kandidatundersøkelsen 2025: Arbeidsmarkedssituasjonen for nyutdannede masterkandidater” (master’s graduates ~6 months out; excludes BI Norwegian Business School). Statistics Norway (SSB), “Hvem har høyest startlønn?” — starting monthly gross salary by field, 2024. SSB salary figures are gross monthly.