A train driver in the UK earns a median of £76,327 a year working full-time. A GP earns £55,494. A civil engineer earns £51,366. An architect, after seven years of training, earns £47,143.
These are not selective comparisons. They are the full-time medians from the 2025 provisional edition of the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, and they describe one of the most persistent blind spots in how British careers get discussed.
The short answer
Full-time median gross annual pay, ONS ASHE 2025 provisional:
- Train and tram drivers: £76,327
- Generalist medical practitioners (GPs): £55,494
- Civil engineers: £51,366
- Architects: £47,143
- Midwives: £46,990
- Electricians and electrical fitters: £39,647
Train drivers also recorded a 19.3% increase on the previous year, one of the largest movements in the survey.
Why the number is so high
Three things are doing the work, and none of them is a mystery.
The role is safety-critical and hard to substitute. Training takes a year or more, the licence is route-specific, and an employer cannot quickly replace a driver who leaves. That is the classic setup for wage bargaining power.
Union density is high. Train drivers are among the most heavily unionised workers in the country, negotiating collectively rather than individually. Pay in the occupation moves in negotiated steps rather than by annual review, which is also why the year-on-year figure jumps rather than drifts.
The work is unsociable. Nights, weekends and early starts are built into the roster, and the median reflects that.
The comparison that gets made unfairly
It is tempting to read £76,327 against £55,494 for a GP as evidence that something is broken. That comparison needs care.
ASHE measures employees on payrolls. Many GPs are partners rather than employees, and partnership income does not appear in this survey at all — so the GP figure describes salaried GPs, a specific and not necessarily representative group. The train driver figure has no such complication: essentially all of them are employees.
The honest version of the comparison is narrower and still surprising: a salaried GP earns less than a train driver. That is true, and it is a real fact about how the two labour markets clear.
What it says about the graduate premium
The assumption underneath most career advice is that qualifications buy earnings. Set the ONS figures against that assumption and it holds far less tidily than the advice implies.
Architects complete a five-year qualification plus two years of practical experience and reach a median of £47,143. Train drivers require no degree. The gap runs £29,184 in the driver's favour, and the architect starts repaying student debt seven years earlier in the process.
This is not an argument against university. Several of the highest-paid occupations in the data are graduate professions, and the median hides enormous variation within each one. It is an argument against treating the graduate premium as automatic — it is an average across very different degrees and very different careers, and plenty of individual comparisons run the other way.
Where else the pattern shows up
Train driving is the clearest case but not the only one. Occupations combining a licence or certification, restricted entry and collective bargaining tend to sit higher than their formal education requirement would predict. Air traffic control, offshore work and some skilled trades follow the same logic.
The reverse is also visible. Occupations that require long training but have many willing entrants — the arts, parts of academia, veterinary work — often pay less than their qualification level suggests, because supply keeps up with demand.
Read the movement carefully
The 19.3% year-on-year rise deserves a caveat. Train and tram drivers are a small occupation in survey terms: 24,000 employees. Smaller groups produce noisier year-on-year estimates, and negotiated settlements can land in one year and not the next, so a single edition's change should not be read as a trend.
The level, £76,327, rests on firmer ground than the change does. We have written separately about how to read a salary figure and what the small print underneath it usually hides.
Check the figures yourself
Every occupation mentioned here has its own page with the full distribution and regional breakdown: train drivers, doctors, civil engineers, architects, midwives and electricians. Our methodology page sets out 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. ASHE covers employees on company payrolls only, which is why self-employed and partnership income does not appear.