The UK's headline gender pay gap is 6.9%. Look at individual occupations and the gaps run three times wider — 24.1% among financial managers, 19.4% among office managers, 17.7% among solicitors.
Both sets of numbers come from the same survey. The difference between them is one of the more useful things in British pay data, and it points somewhere most coverage does not go.
The short answer
Comparing median full-time annual pay for men and women in the same occupation, using the 2025 provisional ASHE and restricting to occupations where ONS publishes an employee count for both sexes:
- Financial managers and directors: £86,152 against £65,376 — a 24.1% gap
- Marketing and commercial managers: £60,527 against £46,330 — 23.5%
- IT business analysts and architects: £61,827 against £48,359 — 21.8%
- Office managers: £45,015 against £36,274 — 19.4%
- Software developers: £58,657 against £47,566 — 18.9%
- Solicitors and lawyers: £63,337 against £52,095 — 17.7%
Why these are so much bigger than 6.9%
The national headline measures hourly pay for full-time employees. The occupational figures above measure annual pay for full-time employees. That single difference does most of the work.
Hourly pay compares the rate for an hour of work. Annual pay compares the rate and the hours together, and "full-time" covers a wide range — a 37-hour week and a 55-hour week are both full-time, and they do not pay the same. Bonuses and overtime also land in the annual figure and not the hourly one.
Neither measure is the honest one. They answer different questions, and our explainer on the four different UK gender pay gaps sets out which to use when.
The finding that undermines the usual explanation
The standard account of the pay gap is that women are concentrated in lower-paying occupations. That is true, and it explains part of the national figure. It does not explain these.
Every gap listed above is within a single occupation, so occupational segregation cannot be the cause. And two of them sit in occupations where women are the clear majority:
- Office managers: 104,000 women against 49,000 men — and a 19.4% gap
- Solicitors and lawyers: 61,000 women against 45,000 men — and a 17.7% gap
Women outnumber men two to one in office management and still earn £8,741 less at the median. Whatever is producing that, it is not a shortage of women in the field.
The likeliest explanation is seniority mix. An occupation is not a job — "solicitor" spans a newly qualified assistant and an equity partner, and a median compares the middle of each group rather than like-for-like roles. Where men are concentrated in the senior half of an occupation, the occupational median gap will be wide even if every individual role pays identically.
Five occupations where it runs the other way
The gap is not universal. In a handful of occupations women's median full-time pay is higher:
- Managers in logistics: £50,134 against £44,062 — women ahead by 13.8%
- Personal assistants and secretaries: £35,000 against £32,994 — 6.1%
- Barristers and judges: £50,987 against £49,843 — 2.3%
- Social workers: £44,665 against £44,053 — 1.4%
- Managers in transport and distribution: £47,725 against £47,399 — 0.7%
Two of these deserve scepticism rather than celebration. Logistics managers rest on 18,000 men and 9,000 women, and barristers on 10,000 and 7,000 — small enough that a change in who responded could produce the result. The last one, at 0.7%, is inside anything reasonably called measurement error.
The two worth taking seriously are personal assistants, where the female figure rests on 78,000 employees, and social workers, on 68,000. In both cases women make up the large majority of the occupation and the men in it are the unusual case — which is the mirror image of the seniority story above.
The figures we left out
Search for the widest gender pay gaps and you will find plumbers and carpenters quoted at 32% and 27%. We have those numbers too, and we have not used them.
ONS publishes a median for women in those trades but suppresses the employee count, which is the survey's way of saying the group is too small to describe reliably. A gap calculated against a median that ONS itself will not put a headcount next to is not evidence of anything. We wrote separately about how to read a salary figure, and the same caution applies here.
What to do with this
If you are checking your own position, the occupational annual gap is the wrong benchmark — it compares you to a different mix of seniority, not to your own role. The hourly full-time gap is closer, and your employer's published gender pay gap report, which most UK employers over 250 staff must file, is closer still.
If you are arguing about policy, the direction matters more than the decimal. A gap that persists in majority-female occupations is a different problem from one caused by which industries women enter, and the two need different remedies.
Check your occupation
The pages for office managers, solicitors, software developers, personal assistants and social workers carry the full distribution for each. Our pay gap tool compares any two occupations directly.
Source
Source: Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14 (occupation, 4-digit SOC), 2025 provisional edition. Suppressed employee counts follow the ONS quality thresholds for ASHE estimates.