Can 低い be used to describe "salary"?


I was under the impression that 安い is used for anything related to "cost",
whereas 低い is used to mean low for all things general.

However, a simple Google search shows [~99k records for
低いお給料](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%E4%BD%8E%E3%81%84%E3%81%8A%E7%B5%A6%E6%96%99%22),
contrasted to [~273k records for
安いお給料](https://www.google.com/search?q=%22%E5%AE%89%E3%81%84%E3%81%8A%E7%B5%A6%E6%96%99%22).

Is it _proper_ to use 低い to mean "low salary"?

Or is it simply an example of usage corruption?




I agree that both 低い給料 and 安い給料 are acceptable, but the latter is far more
common. On the other hand 低い収入 is common and 安い収入 is borderline acceptable. I
make sense of this as follows.

給料 talks about money directly (containing the kanji 料, cf. 有料), and the way to
talk about money is to use 安い・高い. Think of 給料 as _salary_. 給料 can be 安い,
because it is a fixed amount of money for a fixed of time. 給料 appears on a
single pay-check.

収入 on the other hand is a more abstract way to talk about someone's _income_
and in that sense is only indirectly about money. A 収入 is 低い, because it is an
average amount of money for a standard amount of time (usually a year). 収入 has
to be calculated over several pay-checks, possibly from different sources.

In English, of course we say "low salary" and "low income", but from the
difference of "salary" and "income" I don't think it's too far a stretch of
one's imagination that "salary" (a one-off payment for a one-off job) could
described to be "cheap" in Japanese.




As rintaun wrote, Google counts are not that reliable. To advocate the use of
a corpus, here are some numbers from the [Balanced Corpus of Contemporary
Written Japanese
(BCCWJ)](https://japanese.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/522/google-counts-
may-not-be-as-reliable-as-you-imagine/1086#1086):

  * 低いお給料 vs 安いお給料: 0 vs 0
  * 低い給料 vs 安い給料: 0 vs 16
  * 給料が低 vs 給料が安: 4 vs 22  
(I checked all the results, and I think that all of the results matches the
grammatical structure we were expecting here, not something like **給料が安**
定している.)

I think that it is fair to conclude from this that at least in written text,
安い is more common than 低い when describing 給料, although both are used.

On the other hand, in the case of 収入 and 所得, 低い is much more common:

  * 低い収入 vs 安い収入: 0 vs 0
  * 収入が低 vs 収入が安: 10 vs 0  
(収入が低 gave 15 results, but 5 out of the 15 were different words from 低い; 収入が安
gave 8 results, but all of them were 収入が安定.)

  * 低い所得 vs 安い所得: 4 vs 0
  * 所得が低 vs 所得が安: 17 vs 0  
(所得が低 gave 21 results, but 4 out of the 21 were different words from 低い; 所得が安
did not give any results.)

