The average Georgian wage beats Azerbaijan's, and the legal minimum is ₾20 a month

On figures compiled in late February 2026 from the Azerbaijani labour ministry and Georgia's statistics office, the average gross salary in Azerbaijan was 1,100 manat a month, put at about $647, and in Georgia 2,270 lari a month, put at about $850. Median individual income was closer: about $4,235 a year in Azerbaijan against about $4,494 in Georgia, which tells you the Georgian average is pulled up by a thinner top layer rather than by everyone earning more. Georgia's own statistics office recorded an average nominal salary of 2,363.8 lari in the first quarter of 2026, up 8.9% year on year, and a later release put it at 2,389.3 lari. The small differences between those numbers are periods and vintages, not contradictions.

The sharpest contrast is at the bottom of the scale. Azerbaijan's statutory minimum wage was 400 manat a month, about $235, or roughly 2.30 manat an hour. Georgia's was 20 lari a month, about $7.49, or roughly 12 tetri an hour. That is not a typo and it is not a cost advantage anyone actually uses: the lowest regional average salary in Georgia is about sixty times the statutory floor, so the number binds nobody and prices nothing. If you are costing a business here, ignore the legal minimum entirely and price against the regional average for the work you need done, because that is what the market will charge you.

Geostat's first-quarter 2026 breakdown puts Tbilisi at the top with an average of 2,779.6 lari a month, and Racha-Lechkhumi and Kvemo Svaneti at the bottom with 1,223.3 lari, against a national average of 2,363.8. The capital pays more than twice what the poorest region pays — a bigger internal gap than the dollar gap between the Georgian and Azerbaijani averages. For anyone hiring, that is the number that matters: labour in Tbilisi is not cheap relative to the rest of the country, and the regions where it is cheaper are also where the people you want may not be.

Wages are the ceiling on long-term residential rent. A tenant on a Tbilisi average salary of about 2,780 lari a month can carry a certain rent and no more, and in a region paying 1,223 lari the arithmetic is different by a factor of two. That is why local long-let yields and short-let yields behave so differently in the same building: one is limited by what Georgian salaries can absorb, the other by what visitors will pay for a week. If your plan is long-term tenants, the wage series above is the demand curve you are actually selling into, and it is growing at around 8-9% a year rather than at the pace of asking rents.