How much is the normal salary of a postdoctoral fellow in North America and Western Europe?
Let's find some official numbers and statistics. From this article:
As a baseline, in 2012, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) National Research Service Award (NRSA) postdoctoral stipend for new postdocs was $39,264, increasing to $54,180 for those with seven or more years of experience. Funding levels at universities are broadly similar.
Post-doc salary guidelines depend on individual institutions, and benefits vary widely from place to place. In addition to salary, checking the benefits is important in the US, but less important in more civilized/socialistic (strike out the inapplicable term) countries.
A job site that gathers salary information from US job advertisements has the following for post-doctoral fellowships:
Post-Doctoral Fellow average salary is $39,302, median salary is $38,000 with a salary range from $20,779 to $961,896.
I think it's safe to say that $961,896 is an outlier, but apart from that, the median matches the NRSA number. It also shows that there is a broad range of salaries, even by browsing the job listings on that site.
For Europe, as I've said the situation is heterogeneous. I know how to find numbers for UK, at least. If you look at jobs postings from jobs.ac.uk for post-doctoral positions, the range appears to be £28,000 – £37,000 (apart from a few outliers). This would be roughly $44,000 – $58,000, but you have to adjust for taxes, health insurance, and then cost of living (which can be quite high in UK).
In France, CNRS is the largest scientific employer, and its post-doc salary is:
The gross monthly salary of a CNRS postdoc is 2,500 €
As an anecdote, when I started as assistant professor, my salary was significantly lower than my post-doc salary. And even some of my post-docs in my group had higher pay than me (as well as some industry-employed PhD students). But money's not everything…
@All, I can only give you some examples. In most areas in physics, in the USA, the postdoc salary ranges from 36000-45000US$ for most universities. Some high-ranked universities pay as much as 60000$ too to their physics postdocs, with an exception of Simons Center which pays 70000$. On the other hand, national labs pay around 70000$ for their physics postdocs - I don't know why the difference between the university payscale and the national lab payscales in the same country for the same field!
In the UK it is fairly uniform for any field, at least in science and engineering. It is usually between £29000 to £33000 per year. Where you lie in this range depends on how many years you have passed after your Ph.D.
In Australia, they usually pay 60000-70000 AUD + 9% (if the contract is for short term - I don't know if the short term means 1 year or less than 3 years though) or 17% (if the contract is for 3 years or more) superannuation, i.e., retirement fund. Again, there are precise rules on where you lie in this range depending on years after the PhD date.
In South Africa, it is somewhere between 180000-240000 Rand per year tax-free.
In New Zealand, you may expect the salary around 50000-60000 NZ$.
In Germany the salary levels seemed complicated to me when I was applying as there are many kinds of taxes and you may avoid some if you are married and have child etc.
In Brazil, you may expect around US$14000 for the national postdoc fellowship (52000BRL). With month life cost of US$1073 (3966BRL )
If you ask me, the postdoc life is miserable if you are in most universities in the USA and have even a small family to support. In my experience, Australia or the UK where the salaries are uniform and above the national averages for the fresh engineers (or other professionals), your life can be much more pleasant - well unless you are in the expensive area in Sydney or London!
Brazil seems excellent too but I can't speak Portuguese !
Edit: Forgot about Ireland. The salaries are around €35000 per year. I used to get paid around €43000 per year (each every expenses like insurance, taxes, 'levy' which was another kind of tax, etc. were on me though) in 2009-2010, however I would think the salary levels have gone lower after the credit crunch in which Ireland has been affected the most.
I should also mention that most postdocs in Math departments in the USA are paid 48000-55000 US$ per year but they have to teach 2 courses a year or so whereas the physics postdocs don't teach at all (if they teach then they get more money than their salary).
Also in Japan and South Korea the salaries are around US$40000 (converting. their local currencies)
In math in the US postdocs generally pay between 40K and 70K with the bulk between 45K and 60K. The AMS has survey data and graphs.