A Zimbabwean engineer is working a site in Saudi Arabia. An Indonesian driller is on a job in Liberia. A Filipino surveyor is stationed in Papua New Guinea. None of them fit the old picture of a “mining expat”; the Aussie fly-in-fly-out contractor, the South African mine manager who’s worked the same three countries his whole career. That picture is out of date, and our data says so plainly: about half of the people who’ve taken the CA Mining salary survey work outside their home country, and between them they represent more than 40 nationalities.
This matters for a simple reason. If you’re planning pay, benefits, or retention around a workforce that no longer exists, you’re planning badly. And right now, most of what the industry “knows” about expat mining pay is either outdated, anecdotal, or based on surveys with too few of the right people in them. We’re trying to fix that. But a survey is only as good as who fills it in and the more mining professionals who take five minutes to add their numbers, the more accurate the picture gets for everyone, including you.
Here’s what the data is already showing us, and why it should matter to you whether you’re the one filling in the form or the one reading the results.
The currency you’re paid in matters more than the job you do
This is the finding that should get the most attention and gets the least. People paid in US dollars take home roughly $70,000 to $75,000. People paid in rand take home about half that, for the same work, sometimes at the same mine, sometimes on the same crew.
The split isn’t random. Dollar-paid workers are mostly expats on international packages. Rand-paid workers are mostly hired locally. So the pay gap isn’t really about skill, output, or role. It’s about which side of the hiring desk you sat on. That’s not a scandal by itself, international packages have always priced differently but the size of the gap, and how invisible it is from the outside, is worth knowing if you’re negotiating a contract, comparing offers, or trying to figure out why the person next to you seems to be living a different life on the same site.
According to the salary survey, the standard raise is a pay cut
The most common annual increase reported is 0% to 5%. In a lot of the countries our respondents work in, inflation runs higher than that. Do the math and the “raise” is a real-terms cut, dressed up as a positive number on a payslip.
Nobody flags this, because nobody’s lying, 3% is still 3%. But a raise that doesn’t keep pace with inflation isn’t neutral, it’s erosion, just slow enough that it doesn’t show up until a few years in, when you look at what your salary actually buys compared to when you started. If you’re an employer, this is worth sitting with: you may be quietly losing purchasing power for your workforce every single year while believing you’re being fair.
Your people aren’t unhappy. They’re mobile.
The typical respondent has 13 years in mining but only 4 years in their current role. That’s not a workforce quitting the industry. It’s an experienced, capable group of people who move constantly between employers, projects, and countries.
If you’re managing a team and reading this as a retention problem, it’s worth reframing. People aren’t leaving mining. They’re leaving jobs, at a rate that suggests loyalty to a role isn’t really how this workforce thinks anymore. The response to “how do we keep people” and the response to “how do we keep people happy” might genuinely be two different projects, and most companies are only running one of them.
Everyone’s expected to train locals. Almost nobody’s checking if it works.
Skills transfer to local staff is expected or required for most of our respondents; often as a legal or licence condition tied to the project itself. But only about 1 in 6 has any real way of measuring whether it’s actually happening.
That gap is bigger than it sounds. If skills transfer is a licence obligation and you can’t demonstrate it, that’s not a soft HR miss, it’s a compliance exposure. Most companies would never let a safety obligation go unmeasured. Skills transfer seems to be getting exactly that treatment.
The cheap fixes are sitting right there, ignored
About 70% of respondents fly economy to site. About 35% say their travel time to site doesn’t count as work hours at all. And when we ask what people actually want out of camp life, it isn’t a gym or a rec room; it’s decent accommodation, decent food and Wi-Fi that works.
None of that is expensive relative to a salary increase. All of it is cheaper than the raise most companies are reluctant to give. And yet it’s the thing that seems to get cut first, or never budgeted for at all. If retention is the goal, this is low-hanging fruit that’s being left to rot.
A degree is not the ceiling
About 36% of respondents hold a postgraduate qualification. But some of the highest earners in the whole survey have a trade certificate and 30 years of experience and they’re pulling in $150,000 or more. In mining, at a certain point, experience and a willingness to relocate outperform credentials. That’s not always true across industries. It appears to be true here.
Why this needs you, specifically
Every one of these findings comes from people who took ten minutes to fill in a form. The more responses we get, especially from the nationalities, roles, and countries that are underrepresented right now, the more this data reflects the industry as it actually is, not as it was ten years ago when “expat” meant one specific kind of person from one specific place.
If you’re a Zimbabwean in Saudi Arabia, an Indonesian in Liberia, a Filipino in PNG, or anyone else living the reality this article describes, your number is the one that’s currently missing. Fill in the survey. Not because it’s good corporate citizenship, but because right now you’re one of the only people who can tell the industry the truth about what it’s actually paying, in what currency, for what work and whether the raise you got last year actually left you better off.
Take the CA Mining Salary Survey
The data doesn’t lie. It just needs enough of you in it.
