Search for the UK gender pay gap and you will find it reported as roughly 7%. Search a little harder and you will find 12%, and somewhere else 28%. None of those numbers is wrong, and none of them is a rounding difference. They come from the same survey, in the same year, measuring different things.
This is the single most common confusion in pay reporting, and it matters, because the figure someone quotes usually tells you what argument they are making.
The short answer
Using the 2025 provisional edition of the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, the gap between men's and women's median pay is:
- 6.9% for full-time employees, measured on hourly pay excluding overtime — this is the official headline figure
- 12.8% for all employees on the same hourly basis, full-time and part-time together
- 27.6% for all employees measured on gross annual pay
- 2.9% in women's favour among part-time employees
If you only remember one thing: the smaller figures compare pay for an hour of work, and the largest one compares pay for a year of work. Women in the UK are far more likely to work part-time, so an annual comparison is partly measuring hours, not rates.
What the official 6.9% actually measures
The headline gap you see in the news compares the median hourly pay of full-time men with full-time women, excluding overtime. Full-time men earn a median of £20.27 an hour; full-time women earn £18.87.
Each part of that definition is doing work. Hourly removes differences in hours worked. Excluding overtime removes a component that men claim disproportionately and that varies week to week. Median rather than mean stops a small number of very large salaries at the top from dominating. Full-time only compares people in broadly comparable working arrangements.
It is a careful, deliberately narrow measure. Its weakness is exactly that narrowness: by excluding part-time workers it leaves out a group that is around three-quarters female, and so it says nothing about one of the largest structural differences in how men and women are employed.
Why the annual figure is nearly four times bigger
On gross annual pay across all employees, men have a median of £38,466 and women £27,850 — a gap of 27.6%.
That figure is real, and it describes something the hourly measure cannot: the difference in what actually arrives in people's bank accounts over a year. But most of the distance between 6.9% and 27.6% is hours, not rates. Median full-time hourly pay is £19.67 against £14.11 part-time — and part-time work is overwhelmingly done by women.
So when you see the annual figure quoted as though it were the pay gap for the same work, that is a misuse. And when you see the 6.9% quoted as though it captured the whole picture, that is a different kind of misuse.
Part-time is the one place women earn more
Among part-time employees, median hourly pay is £14.25 for women and £13.85 for men — women ahead by 2.9%.
This is not evidence that part-time work favours women. It reflects who does it: part-time men are concentrated in students, early-career workers and people winding down toward retirement, while part-time women include large numbers of experienced professionals in nursing, teaching and administration who have moved to reduced hours. The comparison is between two quite different populations that happen to share a working pattern.
It is worth knowing anyway, because it is the clearest demonstration that a pay gap is a statement about who does which jobs at least as much as about what those jobs pay.
Which occupations have the widest gaps
Across the 386 occupations where ONS publishes an hourly median for both sexes, the widest gaps among larger occupations are:
| Occupation | Men | Women | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial managers and directors | £42.38 | £30.95 | 27% |
| Welding trades | £16.25 | £12.68 | 22% |
| Business associate professionals n.e.c. | £20.86 | £16.45 | 21.1% |
| Electricians and electrical fitters | £19.07 | £15.41 | 19.2% |
| IT business analysts, architects and systems designers | £31.87 | £25.91 | 18.7% |
Financial managers and directors stands out: a gap of 27% within a single occupational group. Seniority explains part of it — "managers and directors" spans a wide range of roles and men are more heavily represented at the top of it — but a gap that size inside one occupation is not explained by occupational choice alone.
And where it reverses
| Occupation | Men | Women | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Youth and community workers | £15.33 | £16.67 | -8.7% |
| Vehicle technicians, mechanics and electricians | £16.80 | £17.85 | -6.3% |
| Further education teaching professionals | £23.81 | £25.20 | -5.8% |
| Managers in transport and distribution | £21.77 | £22.88 | -5.1% |
| IT network professionals | £23.99 | £24.81 | -3.4% |
These are smaller reversals than the gaps above, and they are worth reading with the same caution: they describe the mix of people in each job, not a policy of paying women more.
A pay gap is not the same as unequal pay
Paying a man and a woman differently for the same work has been unlawful in the UK since the Equal Pay Act 1970, and those provisions now sit in the Equality Act 2010. That is equal pay, and it is a legal question about two specific people doing comparable work.
A pay gap is a statistical comparison of averages across a whole group. A large gap can exist in an organisation where every individual is paid lawfully, if men and women are distributed differently across senior and junior roles. Equally, a small gap does not prove that no one is being underpaid.
The two get conflated constantly, usually by people who want the gap figure to carry more moral weight than it can bear, or who want to dismiss it because it does not prove illegality. It measures structure. That is enough to be worth measuring.
How to check your own occupation
Our gender pay gap tool lets you look up any occupation we hold ONS figures for and see the male and female medians side by side. If what you actually want to know is whether you are paid fairly for your role, the more useful question is where your salary sits in the distribution for your job — our salary checker answers that directly, and every salary guide shows the full range.
The wider picture, including how pay has moved over the year and how it varies by region, is in our annual UK pay report.