Look up what a retail assistant earns in the UK and you will probably be told £14,491 a year. It is a real figure, published by the Office for National Statistics, and it describes 895,000 people — one of the largest occupations in the country.
It is also almost certainly not the number you wanted. A retail assistant working a full week earns a median of £25,056. Both figures come from the same survey, in the same year, and neither is a mistake.
The short answer
Using the 2025 provisional edition of the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, a sales and retail assistant earns:
- £14,491 a year across all employees, part-time and full-time together
- £25,056 a year for full-time employees only
- £11,982 a year for part-time employees only
- £12.62 an hour, excluding overtime, across all employees
The annual figures differ by 73%. The hourly figure barely moves between the groups — full-time retail assistants earn £13.22 an hour against £12.62 for everyone. Almost the entire annual gap is hours worked, not the rate paid for them.
What £14,491 actually describes
Divide the annual figure by the hourly one and you get roughly 1,148 hours of work in a year. Spread across 52 weeks, that is about 22 hours a week.
That is the shape of the job the headline number describes: a part-time contract, a bit over half a full week. Do the same sum for the full-time figure and you get 1,895 hours, or 36.4 hours a week — a normal full-time retail rota, which is a good sign the arithmetic is sound.
The division is approximate: annual pay includes overtime and bonuses while the hourly figure excludes overtime, so treat the hours as an estimate rather than a measurement. It is close enough to make the point.
Retail and warehouse pay nearly the same by the hour
Set two large, comparable occupations next to each other and the effect becomes hard to miss.
- Sales and retail assistants: £12.62 an hour, £14,491 a year
- Warehouse operatives: £13.62 an hour, £26,574 a year
By the hour, warehouse work pays 7.9% more. By the year, it pays 83% more — a gap of £12,083. The hourly difference is real but small. The annual difference is mostly a fact about scheduling: warehouse work is overwhelmingly full-time, and the all-employee figure implies about 37.5 hours a week. Retail is not, and implies 22.
If you are choosing between the two, the hourly rate tells you which pays better for your time. The annual figure tells you how many hours the average person in each job is given.
Which jobs this hits hardest
The pattern shows up wherever part-time work is common, and those tend to be the largest and most searched-for occupations in the country.
- Sales and retail assistants (895,000 employees): £14,491 all employees, £25,056 full-time — an implied 22 hours a week
- Receptionists (185,000): £18,152 against £24,678 — about 27 hours
- Care workers and home carers (581,000): £21,487 against £27,468 — about 31 hours
- Other administrative occupations (728,000): £23,385 against £28,294 — about 31 hours
- Nursing auxiliaries and assistants (466,000): £24,761 against £29,084 — about 33 hours
Baristas are the most extreme case we hold: £12,170 across all employees against £21,598 full-time, a difference of 77%. At the other end, warehouse operatives and software developers show gaps of under 5%, because almost everyone in those jobs works a full week.
The all-employee figure is not a mistake
It would be easy to conclude that the lower number is wrong and should be discarded. It is not, and it should not.
The all-employee median answers a real question: what do people in this occupation actually earn in a year? For a sector where part-time work is the norm rather than an exception, that is often the more honest description of the working life. The all-employee median of £14,491 sits far closer to the part-time figure of £11,982 than to the full-time £25,056, which tells you the median retail assistant is working part-time. A figure that quietly assumes otherwise describes a job that most of them do not have.
The two numbers answer different questions. What does this job pay? is a question about rates, and the full-time or hourly figure answers it. What do people in this job earn? is a question about rates and hours together, and the all-employee figure answers that.
Why so many salary figures are quietly wrong
Most salary pages, including ours until recently, pick one of these and present it without saying which. That is how a retail assistant's pay ends up published as £14,491 next to a software developer's £55,587, as though the two were measured the same way. They are not: one of those occupations is roughly half part-time and the other is barely part-time at all.
It is worth noticing that £14,491 is below what a full-time job at the National Living Wage pays. A figure that cannot describe a full week is a strong hint that it is not describing one.
What we changed
Every salary page on this site now shows the full-time median alongside the all-employee figure, and where the two differ by more than 10% the page says so in plain words and leads with the full-time number. Thirty-three of our occupation pages were affected.
Regional pages are the exception, and not by choice: ASHE does not publish a full-time and part-time split below national level, so a page for retail assistants in the North West can only show the all-employee median. Those pages now say that rather than leaving you to assume otherwise.
How to read any salary figure
Whoever is quoting it, three questions settle what a number means:
- Full-time, or everyone? The single largest source of difference, and the one most often left unstated.
- Hourly, or annual? Hourly compares rates. Annual compares rates and hours together.
- Median, or mean? The mean is pulled upward by a small number of very high earners. Retail assistants have a median of £14,491 and a mean of £16,086.
You can check any occupation on this site: the retail assistant page now carries all of these figures, as do the pages for care workers, receptionists and warehouse operatives. Our methodology page explains which ONS series each figure comes from.
Source
Source: Office for National Statistics, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14 (occupation, 4-digit SOC), 2025 provisional edition. ONS publishes guidance on interpreting ASHE estimates, including the quality thresholds referred to above.