"Accountant" covers everything from a newly qualified ACA in a Big Four audit team to a sole practitioner doing small-business tax returns, and job adverts price the two very differently. The Office for National Statistics measures them together, which turns out to be useful: it gives a single, honest picture of what the qualification is worth across the whole economy.
The figures here are from the 2025 provisional Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, taken from PAYE records. The occupation is SOC 2421, "Chartered and certified accountants". The word "chartered" matters: this group is for qualified accountants. Accounts staff without a professional qualification are filed elsewhere, and we come back to them below.
The headline
- Median, all employees: £45,538 a year
- Median, full-time: £50,062
- Mean: £50,563
- Hourly, excluding overtime: £25.80
- Change on the year: −1.3% in the median (full-time: +0.6%)
- Jobs counted: 75,000
Two things stand out. The full-time median is 9.9% above the all-employees figure, a larger gap than in most professional occupations, because 14,000 of the 75,000 jobs are part-time. And the median did not grow: across all UK employees pay rose 4.1% in the same period. One year is not a trend, and ONS puts the sampling error on this estimate at 5.8%, wide enough that a 1.3% fall is indistinguishable from no change. It is also wide enough that a 1.3% fall is indistinguishable from a 4% one.
The all-employees median lands almost exactly on the £45,254 that professional occupations as a whole earn. A qualified accountant is paid like a typical professional, no more and no less. The accountant salary page tracks this figure and its regional versions.
The range
- Bottom 10% earn under £23,274
- Bottom quarter earn under £33,974
- Top quarter earn over £64,223
ONS does not publish a 90th percentile for this group; the sample at the top is too thin. The bottom 10% figure will surprise anyone who thinks of accountancy as a well-paid profession from day one: £23,274 is below the UK median for all employees. That is where trainees and part-time practitioners sit. The top quarter, above £64,223, is where a qualified accountant with a few years in industry should expect to be.
For a rough reading of the range: the bottom quarter is a starting salary, the median is a qualified accountant a few years in, and the top quarter is a finance manager in all but title.
Men and women
This is one of the few professions where women are close to parity in numbers: 36,000 of the 75,000 jobs against 39,000 for men. Pay is another matter.
- Men, all employees: £49,142
- Women, all employees: £41,866 — 14.8% less
- Men, full-time: £53,067
- Women, full-time: £48,208 — 9.2% less
Unlike in software development, restricting to full-time work closes a good part of the gap, which says that part-time working, overwhelmingly by women, explains about a third of the headline difference. The remaining 9.2% among full-timers does not have an explanation in ASHE. See the pay gap page for how that compares with other professions.
Where it pays more
ASHE publishes regional medians for this occupation, but with one exception it flags all of them as imprecise, with sampling errors above 10%. We quote them because they are the only official regional figures that exist, and we decline to rank them.
- London: £61,747 (13% sampling error)
- South East: £52,294 (16%)
- South West: £43,412 (11%)
- East Midlands: £42,485 (16%)
- Wales: £37,375 (no error estimate published)
For the North West, Scotland, Yorkshire, the West Midlands and the East of England, ONS publishes no median at all. Roughly speaking, London pays qualified accountants a third more than the national figure, and the further from the South East, the closer to it. Anyone who wants a precise regional number for this profession will not get one from ASHE 2025.
Accountants against the rest of finance
The most useful comparison is with the roles accountants move into and out of.
- Financial managers and directors: £65,336 (full-time £76,447; 430,000 jobs)
- Management consultants and business analysts: £51,729
- Actuaries, economists and statisticians: £51,520
- Finance and investment analysts and advisers: £47,776 (197,000 jobs, up 9.2%)
- Taxation experts: £46,280
- Chartered and certified accountants: £45,538
- Financial accounts managers: £45,162 (129,000 jobs)
- Book-keepers, payroll managers and wages clerks: £27,743 (272,000 jobs)
- Finance officers: £28,610
The chartered qualification is worth about £18,000 a year over book-keeping at the median, and the step from accountant to financial manager is worth about £20,000 more, or £26,000 on full-time pay. That second step is where the money in this career is. It is also where the sample is largest: there are nearly six times as many financial managers and directors as chartered accountants, which is another way of saying that most people who qualify do not stay in a role titled "accountant" for long.
Reading an offer
If the offer is under £33,974, you are being paid as a trainee whether or not the job title says so. If it is around £50,062 and full-time, you are at the median for the qualification. Above £64,223, you are in the top quarter and should probably be asking whether the title should say manager. The salary check will place any figure against this distribution, and the comparison tool will set accountancy against the other finance roles above.