Co-ordinated Organisations: How NATO, the OECD and ESA Set Salaries

A vacancy at NATO quotes a grade of G17. One at the Council of Europe quotes A4. ESA advertises a band, A2–A4, and the OECD asks for a PAL6. Four notations, four employers — and one remuneration system underneath all of them. These organizations, together with ECMWF and EUMETSAT, are the Co-ordinated Organisations: a group of six whose pay moves together each year under a single agreed method, administered from a small office in Paris.

What the coordination covers is narrower than the name suggests. It is a method for moving salaries — one decision a year, taken on evidence gathered once and used by all six. It is not a common scale. Each of the six sets its own, on its own ladder, in its own currencies, for its own list of countries, which is why no master table of Co-ordinated Organisation salaries exists. Not hard to find: not published. Knowing that a post sits inside the system explains how its pay is decided. It does not reveal the figure.

What the six are, and why they are grouped

The Co-ordinated Organisations are a co-operation arrangement between six European-founded international organizations, spanning 57 member countries, more than 20,000 serving staff and over 11,000 pensioners in 52 countries. The organizations themselves are of very different vintages — NATO and the Council of Europe both date from 1949, the OECD from 1960, ESA and ECMWF from the 1970s — but those are founding dates rather than accession dates, and the coordination arrangement grew up around them over the decades that followed. Only the newest arrival has a clean date: EUMETSAT joined the system on 1 July 2012.

What binds them is a shared answer to a problem every international organization faces. An employer that recruits internationally, exempts staff from national income tax and operates across several countries cannot simply track one national civil service, and has no obvious market to benchmark against. The six agreed instead to move their salaries together, on evidence gathered once and used by all of them — a considerable saving in effort, and a considerable source of confusion for anyone who assumes shared evidence means shared pay.

What is actually coordinated

Two bodies do the work. The Co-ordinating Committee on Remuneration agrees how salaries move. The International Service for Remunerations and Pensions — the ISRP, hosted at the OECD in Paris — carries out the salary studies, surveys and statistics behind that decision, and administers pension arrangements for the group. The rules governing the method are annexed to the participating organizations' own staff regulations, which is where they can be read in full.

Four features run across all six. Salaries are reviewed on an annual cycle against cost-of-living movement and reference pay in the host countries, rather than negotiated employer by employer. Staff pay an internal tax to the organization and are then exempt from national income tax in member states, so a published figure is not comparable with a private-sector gross salary. Pay is differentiated by country of work, so the same grade is deliberately a different number in each country the organization operates in. And expatriation and family allowances sit on top of the scale, assessed at recruitment and reviewed as personal circumstances change.

The six at a glance

Everything below the method is the individual organization's own, and the differences are large enough to make casual cross-employer comparison unreliable. The table below sets out where each of the six currently stands.

Where the six diverge

The grade ladder. NATO grades civilian posts on a single spine running G1 to G24, applied across all NATO bodies. ESA publishes A1 to A7 for professional posts, B2 to B6, and G2 to G6. The Council of Europe, ECMWF and EUMETSAT use the classic four-category structure — C for support roles, B for technical and executive work, L for linguists, A for policy and management. The OECD has moved most posts onto job families: PAL for policy analysis and legal work, CF for corporate functions, GA for general administration, EL for executive leadership, with the older A/L/B/C scale still in force alongside them for staff never transferred. A letter and a number mean nothing without the employer's name attached.

What the published figure represents. This is the trap, and it catches careful people. ESA and the Council of Europe publish tables written for candidates: net monthly salary, after internal tax, social security and pension have come out. NATO publishes the first step of basic salary for each grade. ECMWF publishes basic salary net of tax. EUMETSAT and the OECD publish plain basic salary from their staff rules — and the OECD's separate framework for temporary staff is quoted gross. That is four different bases across six employers. Reading one against another without checking which is which is the single most common error in comparing these organizations, and it can invent a gap that is not there as easily as it can hide one that is.

Steps, and whether the ladder is published at all. NATO, ESA and the Council of Europe publish a single figure per grade — the first step, the number an appointment starts on. ECMWF, EUMETSAT and the OECD publish the whole ladder, first step to top step. Where steps exist they are earned by time served rather than negotiated — typically annually at the bottom of a grade and every two years higher up — so a top step is a destination rather than an opening offer. The half-published ladder is also why a top step at one employer set against a first step at another is the least informative comparison available.

Country coverage. NATO publishes scales for twelve countries, ESA and the Council of Europe for eight each, EUMETSAT four, ECMWF three, and the OECD one — France, where essentially all its staff sit. Coverage follows where the organization actually operates, so a grade with no figure for a given country generally means no post there rather than a number withheld: the Council of Europe publishes no A6 or A7 for Türkiye, and ESA publishes no G-grade for the United States.

Timing. Adjustment dates differ as well, which quietly undermines comparisons made on the same afternoon. At the date of this review, NATO, ESA, the Council of Europe, ECMWF and the OECD are all on scales taking effect in early 2026, while EUMETSAT's most recently published scale runs from January 2025 — a full year apart, in the same currency, on the same screen.

Reading a Co-ordinated Organisation vacancy

Three inputs decide what one of these posts is worth, and only the first usually appears on the advert. The grade fixes the rung. The country of work selects which of that employer's scales applies — the country where the post sits, not where the organization is headquartered. The basis determines whether the published figure is before or after deductions, and it is the input most often skipped.

Where a vacancy advertises a band rather than a single grade, the rung is decided at recruitment against published thresholds. ESA appoints within its A2–A4 band on years of relevant professional experience counted after a master's degree, with a doctorate able to count towards that total; below the band's entry threshold, the post may be filled at A1 instead. The Council of Europe appoints at the higher of A1/A2 or L1/L2 where a candidate has at least six years of relevant experience, and at the higher of B1/B2 or C1/C2 at four years. Those thresholds are published, which makes them worth reading before an interview rather than after an offer.

Misconceptions and clarifications

“The Co-ordinated Organisations publish a common salary scale.” They do not. The ISRP administers a shared adjustment method and publishes studies and statistics; the salary tables themselves are published by each organization separately, in its own documents. A source offering a single consolidated table of Co-ordinated Organisation salaries is reconstructing something the system does not produce.

“An A4 is an A4 across the group.” Five of the six publish an A4 — ESA, the Council of Europe, ECMWF, EUMETSAT and the OECD's legacy scale all run A1 to A7 — which is exactly what makes this the most expensive assumption in the set. The figure attaching to A4 differs by organization, by country and by basis, and the ladders were never calibrated against one another. NATO, the sixth, has no A-grade at all: comparable posts sit somewhere on the G1–G24 spine, and no official crosswalk exists between that spine and anyone else's letters.

“These are UN salaries with a different label.” They are a separate system. There is no ICSC scale and no post adjustment multiplier behind any Co-ordinated Organisation grade. The two systems solve the location problem in opposite directions: the UN common system sets one base salary and corrects it by duty station, while the Co-ordinated Organisations set a different scale per country from the outset.

“Tax-free means the whole published figure is take-home.” Exemption from national income tax is not exemption from deductions. Internal tax, pension contributions and social security still apply, which is precisely why the distinction between a net table and a basic-salary table matters so much within this group.

A note on scope

This article describes the salary architecture of the six Co-ordinated Organisations as their own published documents set it out. It does not cover pensions, leave, health cover, recourse or job security, each of which is governed by the individual organization's staff regulations. Figures are reviewed annually and can change without notice; each organization's own published scale is authoritative, and the reference pages linked below carry the effective date and source document for every figure shown. Staff regulations also vary in how they treat locally recruited personnel, contractors and seconded staff, none of whom are necessarily on the scales described here.

Key takeaways

• Six organizations share an annual salary adjustment method, not a salary scale — the distinction governs everything else.
• The grade notation is employer-specific; NATO's G17, an ESA A3 and an OECD PAL6 belong to different ladders with no official equivalence, and five of the six publish an A4 that means five different things.
• Four different bases are in use across the six, from fully net to gross. Establishing which one a figure is quoted on comes before any comparison.
• Country of work, not headquarters location, selects the applicable scale — and the six publish between one and twelve country scales each.
• Advertised grade bands are resolved at recruitment against published experience thresholds.

Related reading

• Comparing grades across international organizations: UN, EU, World Bank and beyond
• How UN salaries are set: inside the common system
• UN contract types decoded: FTA, TA, continuing and consultancy
• How to read an international vacancy notice
• Working for the UN system and international organizations

For all the confusion the notation causes, the six publish more than most international employers do — full ladders, effective dates and the rules behind them — which makes their pay unusually legible once the method is understood. UNjobnet reproduces each organization's published scale, with its basis and source, on a single reference page per employer: how Co-ordinated Organisation pay works, with all six salary scales →

Last reviewed: August 2026. This guide is general information rather than official HR or financial advice — entitlements should be confirmed with the employing organization's HR and the governing staff regulations.