If you spent 2025 loading cargo at an Australian port, operating a crane on a mining site, or training apprentice electricians, the odds are good your pay packet grew by far more than the national average. Fresh data from SEEK shows a cluster of trade, logistics and technical roles recorded salary increases that left the broader economy's wage growth in the dust.
Topping the list was the stevedore, a role that pre-dates the industrial age but remains central to Australia's trade-dependent economy. SEEK's Advertised Salary Index compared average advertised salaries across the four months to December 2024 with the same period in 2025. Stevedores, commonly known as wharfies, recorded a 22.4% increase, adding roughly $30,185 to their annual earnings and bringing the average advertised salary to $134,756. SEEK senior economist Dr Blair Chapman attributed the jump to new enterprise bargaining agreements signed across the industry during the year.
The second and third places went to industries equally removed from the white-collar office floor. Field service technicians in the mining sector, many of them fly-in, fly-out workers, saw a 20.4% rise that lifted average advertised pay from $115,727 to $145,385. Construction draftspersons were close behind at 19.9%, gaining roughly $19,620 to reach an average of $98,593. Accounting assistant managers rounded out the top four, with a 19.1% rise adding $22,641 to bring their average salary to $118,544.
Chapman pointed to a convergence of forces behind the trades surge. Businesses ramped up investment in data centres, residential building commencements recovered, and government rail and road infrastructure projects kept rolling, all alongside a broader shift toward renewable energy. That combination created genuine competition for qualified tradespeople, and their wages reflected it. Trades trainers, steelfixers, and trades service supervisors all recorded increases above 13.5%, according to the 7News report of the SEEK findings.
Not just brawn: white-collar and care roles also surged
The gains were not confined to heavy industry. Healthcare lecturers recorded a 15.7% increase, lifting average salaries by nearly $21,000 to $133,643. Chapman linked this directly to the Fair Work Commission's Aged Care Work Value Case, which has been delivering staged wage increases to personal care workers and nurses since 2023. That process saw around 400,000 aged care workers receive award wage increases, with further tranches flowing through in January and October 2025. Government and defence administration officers picked up a 15.9% boost, while community services assessors gained 14.1%.
From a centre-right perspective, the pattern here is largely encouraging. When salary growth is driven by enterprise bargaining, genuine skills shortages, and productivity demands from major capital projects, it reflects market forces doing their work rather than mandated distortion. Workers in physically demanding, high-risk, or technically specialised roles are being rewarded, and that is a reasonable outcome.
The equity question is harder to dismiss
Those more sceptical of market-led outcomes will note what the data does not show. The roles recording these exceptional gains are concentrated in industries that skew heavily male. The Maritime Union of Australia has acknowledged that women represent only 19% of the stevedoring workforce, despite recent growth. If the biggest wage increases consistently flow to male-dominated sectors, structural pay equity concerns are not resolved by market dynamics alone.
There is also the question of what happened to workers in sectors that did not feature in SEEK's top 15. Retail, hospitality, early childhood education, and community health workers often face tighter margins and less bargaining power. A 22% gain for a wharfie is genuinely good news, but it sits alongside a broader economy where average wage growth remained far more modest.
The honest conclusion is that both readings are partly correct. Well-functioning labour markets do reward skills in demand, and government infrastructure spending and aged care reform are delivering real improvements for workers who were previously undervalued. At the same time, the distribution of those gains is uneven, and any serious wages policy needs to account for the workers not appearing on lists like this one. The SEEK figures are a snapshot of a market in motion; what they reveal is that 2025 was a good year to be indispensable.