Guide contents
Australian Agricultural Salary Guide 2026
What agribusinesses pay permanent on-farm operational and management staff across broadacre, horticulture, livestock and cotton, role by role.
Fifteen role pages, four sectors. Every band is drawn from the placement and benchmarking work we run for Australian agribusinesses, corroborated against advertised pay, award floors and peak-body data.
What the 2026 market is telling us
Three things stand out across the roles.
Pay rises with operation scale, not job title.
A head stockperson on a large station out-earns an overseer on a small one; a farm manager running a large dryland program out-earns one on a small one. The bands are tiered by operation scale for that reason, not by title alone.
The roles that decide whether an asset performs are the hardest to fill and the most contested.
Farm managers, irrigation managers, cotton managers and the senior trades behind them carry a premium that has held through the year, driven by a thin pool of operators who are both technically deep and commercially literate.
Much of the senior market never reaches a job ad.
Aggregation managers, corporate station managers and multi-site irrigation managers are placed off-market, so their bands lean on placement and benchmarking data rather than advertised pay. Where that is the case, the role page flags it.
What’s in the guide
Fifteen role pages and a methodology page. Each role page carries the base band by operation scale, the benefits that usually sit on top, what moves the number, and the other titles the role is advertised under. All figures are base salary in Australian dollars, current as at June 2026.
This guide covers on-farm production roles: the people working on the property, from hands and operators through to the managers who run them. It does not cover off-farm roles such as agronomy, finance, sales or corporate positions.
A note before the figures. All figures are base salary in Australian dollars. They exclude superannuation (12 per cent from 1 July 2025) and the package on top, which means housing, vehicle and bonuses. Figures are current as at June 2026. “Typical” is where our placements and the market cluster, not a statistical median, and we do not publish percentiles. Where the market is thin or pay is rarely advertised, the role page says so.
The roles
*Based on a 45-hour week. With 60-plus hour weeks through peak season, total earnings run well above the band. The light dot on a bar marks the typical figure for roles on a single national band; tiered roles carry a typical for each tier on the role page.
How we built it
The bands rest first on March Talent Partners placement and benchmarking data and our direct market knowledge across broadacre, horticulture, livestock and cotton from 2024 to 2026. Current advertised pay and neutral published data (Fair Work award rates, Jobs and Skills Australia, peak bodies, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and ABARES) sit underneath as supporting corroboration. No band rests on a single data point, and award rates appear as the legal floor, never as a market rate. The methodology page sets out the full source list, the definitions, the operation-scale tiers, and how we treat remoteness, housing and tax.
About these figures. This guide is general market information, not advice. The bands describe where base pay clusters across the agribusinesses and roles March Talent Partners recruits for across broadacre, horticulture, livestock and cotton. They are not a recommendation or a rate for any individual role: actual pay depends on operation scale, location and remoteness, package structure, and the person in the role. Award rates are minimums only and are not market rates. Tax treatment, including any fringe benefits tax position on housing or a vehicle, should be confirmed with a qualified adviser. Read the methodology for the full source list and definitions.
Benchmark a role against your brief
Tell us the role, the scale and the package you have in mind. We’ll come back to take the full brief and show you where the market actually sits, not a headline number.
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