The authors examine the relationship between the forms of ownership and wages. It uses a unique dataset that includes over 700 thousands worker observations and allows identifying narrowly defined occupations and industries. The analysis based on the estimation of the Mincerian type earnings equation shows that wage differences across the forms of different ownership are significant. Employees in foreign-owned firms have systematically higher wages than comparable workers in similar domestic owned firms. They are followed in descending order by employees in mixed (publicprivate), Russian private, federal state and regional state companies. Municipal firms pay the lowest wages. Conditioning on 3-digit occupations and economic activities narrows the gaps but the pay ranking of the forms of ownership remains unchanged.