Bank credit since 2008 · pay from HIES 2019 · investment from the balance of payments
Where the money goes,
and what the work pays.
Three questions the headline numbers do not answer: which parts of the economy the banking system actually lends to, what a month's work is worth in each industry and to each sex, and how much investment arrives from abroad. All three are published, and none of them are widely read.
Fishing gets 1.1% of the country's credit
Banks and other lenders had MVR 52,929 million out on loan in Jun 2026. Tourism holds 25.7% of it and construction 21.1% — together almost half. Fishing, the country's second industry, holds 1.1%; agriculture holds 0.03%.
Jun 2026
51% in 2008
10.1% in 2008
MVR 17 million in total
Loans outstanding by sector · Jun 2026
The outstanding stock of loans and advances from banks and other financial intermediaries. These are the categories the Monetary Authority publishes, and they sum to the published total, so the shares are exact. Personal loans are households borrowing, not a productive sector.
What this does and does not show. It is the stock of credit outstanding, not new lending in the month, so a sector that borrowed heavily years ago still appears here until the loans are repaid. It covers banks and other financial intermediaries — not money raised abroad, not equity, and not the parent-company funding that an international resort operator would use, which is a real limit when reading tourism’s share. And a small share is not automatically a failure of allocation: fishing is dominated by owner-operated vessels and state-linked processing, which are not financed the same way a resort is.
Women earn 66 rufiyaa for every 100 a man earns
The survey asked what each employed person takes home from their main job. Across the country the average was MVR 10,474 a month — MVR 12,169 for men and MVR 7,995 for women. The gap holds inside almost every occupation, not just between them.
from the main job, 2019
the industry that is a fifth of GDP
MVR 7,995 against MVR 12,169
MVR 2,250 against MVR 9,085
Average monthly pay, by industry
Average monthly income from the main job. Tourism pays MVR 10,034, below transport, finance, information and public administration — an industry that is a fifth of the economy and about two-thirds foreign-staffed sits in the middle of the pay table. Real estate is the highest figure on the chart and rests on a very small number of responses, which is why it should not be read as a finding.
Three things worth stating plainly. This is 2019 — the last round in which MBS published pay, so it predates the pandemic and everything since; there is no more recent official figure to replace it with. It is average income from the main job, including wages and other benefits, so second jobs and business income are not in it. And an average is not a typical wage: in industries where a handful of very high earners sit alongside many low ones — real estate at MVR 30,000 and manufacturing at MVR 4,344 are the two ends — the median would sit well below the number shown here. MBS publishes the same tables for Malé and the atolls separately; the national figures are used throughout.
US$ 857 million of direct investment a year
Foreign direct investment has gone from US$ 424 million in 2011 to US$ 857 million in 2025, a 102% increase. It is the one large inflow that is not tourists spending money, though it is mostly spent building the places tourists stay in.
US$ 424m in 2011
the year before the borders closed
-54% in a single year
direct investment set against travel receipts
Direct investment, and its size against tourism earnings
Direct investment from the balance of payments. The Monetary Authority reports the financial account under BPM6, where an inflow is recorded as a negative number — a net incurrence of liabilities — so the sign is flipped here to read as money arriving, which is what it is. The current year is MMA's own projection and is left out. The line shows the same figure as a percentage of that year's travel receipts, which is the closest thing to a sense of scale the balance of payments offers.
One limitation worth knowing before this figure is used for anything. The balance of payments records direct investment as a single national total: it is not published by industry, by source country, or by project. So the widely repeated claim that most foreign investment in the Maldives goes into tourism cannot be checked against this series — it may well be true, but nothing in the published data confirms or refutes it. A figure that is often quoted with a breakdown attached does not have one here.