Key Findings Average wage earners in the OECD have their take-home pay lowered by two major taxes: individual income and payroll (both employee and employer side). Value-added (VAT) and sales taxes also place a tax burden on take-home pay used for consumption. Before accounting for VAT and sales tax, the average tax burden a single average wage earner faced in the OECD was 34.6 percent of pretax earnings in 2020. The average OECD tax burden on labor has dropped 1.8 percentage points over the past two decades. The average tax burden among OECD countries varies substantially. In 2020, a worker in Belgium faced a tax burden seven times higher than that of a Chilean worker.