Everyone knows London pays more. The question nobody asks is: more for whom?
Run the comparison occupation by occupation through the 2025 provisional edition of the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, and the London premium turns out to be one of the most uneven things in British pay data. For some jobs it is enormous. For others it does not exist at all, and for a few it runs backwards.
The short answer
Comparing median gross annual pay for all employees in London against the UK as a whole:
- Financial managers and directors: £107,433 in London against £65,336 UK-wide — a 64% premium
- Personal assistants and secretaries: £41,039 against £25,233 — 63%
- Solicitors and lawyers: £75,537 against £53,314 — 42%
- Care workers and home carers: £20,635 against £21,487 — 4% less
That last line is not a typo. Care workers in the most expensive city in the country earn slightly less than care workers nationally, and there are 54,000 of them in London for the figure to rest on.
Where the premium is real
The jobs with the largest London premiums share a pattern: they sit close to money, and the employers competing for them are concentrated in a few square miles.
- Financial managers and directors: +64.4%
- Personal assistants and other secretaries: +62.6%
- Legal secretaries: +42.0%
- Solicitors and lawyers: +41.7%
- Chartered and certified accountants: +35.6%
The presence of secretaries and legal secretaries in that list is the interesting part. These are not highly paid occupations nationally — £25,233 and £24,263 respectively. In London they clear £41,039 and £34,459. The premium is not attached to the seniority of the job; it is attached to who you are working for. A PA in a City firm is paid on the firm's scale, not the profession's.
Where it disappears
At the other end, several occupations pay the same in London as anywhere else, or less.
- Head teachers and principals: +0.2% — £71,111 against £70,977
- Construction project managers: −0.5%
- Medical radiographers: −2.8%
- Care workers and home carers: −4.0%
- Managers in logistics: −11.6%
Head teachers and radiographers are paid on national pay frameworks, which is exactly what a national pay framework is designed to do. London weighting exists in those systems, but it is a fixed supplement rather than a market rate, and it does not move the median far.
Care work is the one that should give pause. It is not on a national framework, it is not protected from London's cost of living, and it still pays marginally less there. Whatever is setting care wages, proximity to London is not it.
The two figures that need a warning label
Bricklayers show a 24.9% London discount and barristers 17.9%. Both are striking and both should be treated carefully.
ASHE is a sample survey, and its estimates get noisier as the group being measured gets smaller. There are 15,000 barristers and judges in London in this edition, and no published employee count for bricklayers there at all. A gap that large in a small cell can be a real market effect, a change in who responded, or a shift in the mix of seniority within the sample — and the data cannot tell you which.
The comparisons earlier in this article rest on 137,000 financial managers, 54,000 care workers, 42,000 solicitors and 36,000 PAs. Those are the ones worth acting on.
A premium is not the same as being better off
None of these figures say anything about what the money buys. A 42% premium against London rents is a different proposition from a 42% premium anywhere else, and a 4% discount on care work in London is a considerably worse deal than the number suggests.
Pay data can tell you what employers pay. It cannot tell you what is left at the end of the month, and any comparison that skips that step is only half an answer.
What this means if you are deciding
The useful question is not whether London pays more, but whether it pays more for your job. The answer varies from +64% to −25% depending on the occupation, which is a range wide enough that a national average is close to meaningless.
Every occupation page on this site carries the regional breakdown, so you can check yours directly rather than relying on the general rule. The care worker, solicitor and executive assistant pages are good places to see how differently the same city treats three different jobs.
How these figures are measured
ASHE publishes regional pay for all employees together — full-time and part-time — and does not break regions down by working pattern. Every figure in this article is on that basis, which keeps the comparisons consistent but means they carry the hours worked in each region as well as the rates paid. For occupations where part-time work is common, our article on why one job can have two very different salaries explains what that does to a headline number.
Source
Source: Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 15 (region by occupation) and Table 14 (occupation), 2025 provisional edition. See the ONS guide to interpreting ASHE estimates for how sample size affects regional figures.