The largest pay rise in Britain this year, among occupations big enough for the figure to be reliable, went to care workers. Full-time median pay rose 7.5% to £27,468, ahead of teaching, warehousing, software development and nursing.
It is also, at 581,000 employees, one of the largest occupations in the country — and one of the least written about. This is what the 2025 provisional ASHE data says about it.
The short answer
- £21,487 a year across all employees
- £27,468 a year full-time — up 7.5% on the previous year
- £14,296 a year part-time
- £13.45 an hour, excluding overtime
- 581,000 employees: 301,000 full-time, 280,000 part-time
The rise is worth pausing on. Year-on-year figures in ASHE are noisy for small occupations, but this one rests on 301,000 full-time employees, which makes it one of the more trustworthy movements in the survey. Among occupations with over 300,000 full-time employees it was the largest increase measured.
Almost exactly half the workforce is part-time
301,000 full-time against 280,000 part-time is close to a fifty-fifty split, and it is the single most important fact for reading any care salary figure.
It is why the all-employee median of £21,487 sits £5,981 below the full-time figure. It is not a lower rate of pay — it is fewer hours. The hourly medians make that unusually clear:
- Full-time: £13.39 an hour
- Part-time: £13.50 an hour
- All employees: £13.45 an hour
Part-time care workers earn marginally more per hour than full-time ones. The entire annual gap between the two groups is hours worked, and nothing else. We have written about why this distinction matters in occupations where part-time work is common.
Where you work barely changes what you earn
Regional pay in care work is remarkably flat. From the highest region to the lowest:
- Wales: £22,622
- South East: £22,584
- Scotland: £21,997
- Yorkshire and the Humber: £21,001
- London: £20,635
- West Midlands: £20,001
The full range is £2,621 — about 13% between the best-paying region and the worst. For comparison, financial managers earn 64% more in London than the UK median.
And London is not at the top. It is ninth of the eleven regions measured, £852 below the UK figure. Care workers in the most expensive city in the country earn less than care workers in Wales, Scotland, Yorkshire and the East Midlands.
That combination — flat national pay, no London premium — is what a wage set by public funding formulas rather than local labour markets looks like. Care is commissioned largely by local authorities working to budgets, and the pay reflects the budget rather than the cost of living.
The gender gap is unusually small
Care work is heavily female: 459,000 women against 123,000 men. Among full-time employees the median gap is 7.0% — £28,874 for men against £26,842 for women.
That is small by the standards of the occupations we have looked at. Office managers show 19.4%, solicitors 17.7%, financial managers 24.1%. The likely reason is the shape of the career: care work has a shallow seniority ladder, and where there are fewer rungs above the median there is less room for a gap to open between who stands on them.
It is not an unambiguously good sign. A narrow gap in a low-paid occupation with little progression is a different thing from a narrow gap in a well-paid one.
What the distribution shows
Among full-time care workers, the bottom tenth earn under £17,938 and the top tenth over £38,265. That upper figure is higher than many people would guess, and it reflects senior care workers, managers of small services and staff working substantial unsocial-hours enhancements.
The bottom of the all-employee distribution is where the hours effect shows most starkly: a tenth of care workers appear at under £6,429 a year, which describes a few hours a week rather than a low rate.
Why the rise happened
ASHE reports what was paid, not why, so this is context rather than a finding from the data. Care pay in the UK sits close to the statutory wage floor, and increases in that floor pull the whole occupation up with it. When the minimum rises faster than average earnings, occupations bunched at the bottom of the distribution record the largest increases — which is roughly what the 7.5% represents.
That mechanism has a limit. It raises the floor without changing the shape of the career above it, which is why care pay can rise faster than average and still leave the occupation where it started relative to everything else.
Check the figures
The care worker page carries the full distribution, the regional breakdown and the full-time and part-time splits. Senior care workers and healthcare assistants are measured separately by ONS and are not the same occupation, despite often being used interchangeably in job adverts.
Source
Source: Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14 (occupation, 4-digit SOC) and Table 15 (region by occupation), 2025 provisional edition, SOC 2020 code 6135.