Noblemaire principle
method of determining UN staff compensation
The Noblemaire Principle is the foundational basis used by the United Nations (UN) and its common system to determine the conditions of service and base salary levels for staff in the Professional and higher categories. The primary purpose of the Noblemaire Principle is to ensure that the United Nations can attract and retain the best talent from around the world.
Background
Named after Georges Noblemaire, a French diplomat who chaired a 1921 League of Nations committee on the organization of the Secretariat, the principle establishes that international civil servants should be compensated at a level that allows the organization to recruit from all Member States, including the one with the highest salary levels, and which ensures equal pay for work of equal value regardless of the employee's nationality. Under this framework, the salaries of UN Professional staff are determined by reference to those applicable in the civil service of the country with the highest pay levels, known as the "comparator" civil service. The principle has been codified and administered by the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC), an independent expert body established by the UN General Assembly in 1975 to regulate conditions of service across the UN common system.
By aligning international compensation with the highest-paying national civil service, the UN aims to prevent a situation where citizens of high-income countries are financially disincentivized from joining the international civil service. Human Resources industry data consistently show that professionals generally will not leave their current employer for a new organization without a meaningful salary premium. HR practitioners and career specialists recommend professionals target a standard salary increase of 15 to 25 percent when changing companies. The ICSC regularly reviews UN compensation packages to ensure they remain competitive, arguing that adequate remuneration is essential for maintaining a highly skilled, diverse, and geographically representative workforce capable of executing the complex mandates of the UN system.
Since the inception of the United Nations in 1945, the United States federal civil service has served as the comparator under the Noblemaire Principle.
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This entry incorporates text from “Noblemaire principle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.