Ask what a software engineer earns in the UK and you will get a number anywhere from the high twenties to six figures depending on who is answering. The Office for National Statistics answers it once a year for 360,000 people at once, and the answer is more useful than any single job advert.
Everything below comes from the 2025 provisional edition of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, which reads pay straight from employer PAYE records. ONS files software engineers, developers and programmers together as one occupation, SOC 2134, "Programmers and software development professionals". It does not separate a junior from a principal, and it does not see the self-employed contractor market at all. Keep both in mind.
The headline figure
- Median, all employees: £55,587 a year
- Median, full-time only: £56,914
- Mean: £62,387 — pulled up by the top end, as it always is
- Hourly, excluding overtime: £29.31
- Change on the year: +4.2% in the median
That median is 69% above the £32,890 that all UK employees earn, and comfortably above the £45,254 median for professional occupations as a whole. ONS rates the estimate as precise: its sampling error is 3%, which is about as good as occupational pay data gets.
Full-time and all-employee figures sit close together here because almost nobody does this job part-time: 343,000 of the 360,000 jobs are full-time. That is not true of every occupation, and it is why our software engineer page leads on the all-employees figure where other pages lead on full-time.
What the range looks like
A median tells you where the middle is. The spread tells you what an offer actually means.
- Bottom 10% earn under £30,752
- Bottom quarter earn under £41,141
- Top quarter earn over £75,077
- Top 10% earn over £101,172
The top 10% earn 3.3 times what the bottom 10% earn, inside a single occupation code. ASHE does not record experience, but it is hard to read that spread as anything other than a seniority ladder: the bottom decile is where graduates start and the top decile is where staff and principal engineers end up. Anyone comparing a job offer against "the average" should first decide which rung they are standing on, then compare against the quartile that matches.
London against everywhere else
ASHE publishes the occupation by region, and the gap is large.
- London: £74,284 (96,000 jobs, up 9.2% on the year)
- East of England: £60,203
- South East: £52,671 (down 4.2%)
- South West: £51,631
- North West: £49,505 (up 9.6%)
- East Midlands: £48,744
- West Midlands: £47,744
London pays 33.6% above the national median and 52% above the East Midlands. More than a quarter of all software development jobs in Great Britain are in the capital, which is also why it moves the national figure so much. Scotland (£47,301), Yorkshire (£46,594), the North East (£54,279) and Wales (£45,942) have published figures too, but ONS marks all four as imprecise, with sampling errors above 10%, so we quote them without ranking them.
The South East is the odd one out: the only region in the list where the median fell. One year of ASHE cannot say whether that is a trend or sampling noise, and we would not read anything into it until the 2026 edition is out.
Men, women, and a 20% gap
Of the 360,000 jobs, 300,000 are held by men and 60,000 by women. The pay gap is wider than the gap across the economy.
- Men, all employees: £57,500
- Women, all employees: £46,169 — 19.7% less
- Men, full-time: £58,657
- Women, full-time: £47,566 — 18.9% less
Restricting the comparison to full-time work barely narrows it, so this is not a part-time effect. ASHE cannot say why: it records pay, not role or seniority. What it can say is that the gap exists inside one occupation code, among people doing broadly the same job. The gender pay gap page puts this in the context of the rest of the labour market.
How it compares with the rest of IT
Software development is not the best-paid job in technology. On the all-employees median it sits third.
- IT business analysts, architects and systems designers: £59,593
- IT project managers: £58,016
- Programmers and software developers: £55,587
- IT managers: £55,502
- Cyber security professionals: £54,816 — up 12.9% on the year, the fastest riser in the group
- IT quality and testing professionals: £44,973
- IT user support technicians: £34,314
The architecture and project management roles that developers tend to move into pay a few thousand more at the median, but their top quarters start at £80,881 and £74,520, against £75,077 for developers. The ceiling is similar; the difference is in the middle.
What to do with these numbers
If you are negotiating, the quartiles are the figures to hold on to. An offer at £41,141 in Manchester is not "below average" for a first or second role; it is the bottom-quarter boundary for the whole occupation, in a region where the median is £49,505. An offer above £75,077 anywhere in the country puts you in the top quarter nationally. The salary check will place any figure against this distribution in a few seconds, and the comparison tool will set it beside the other IT occupations above.
And one caveat that applies to every number here: ASHE covers employees. The contractor market, where day rates rather than salaries are the norm, is invisible to it. If the figure you are being quoted is a day rate, this article cannot tell you whether it is good.