Trust & transparency
Salary data methodology
Where our figures come from, what they can tell you, and where they stop being reliable.
Last reviewed: 29 August 2026
Who publishes this site?
WhatDoIEarn.co.uk is owned and operated by AXSystem Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales under Company Number 17085060. Editorial responsibility sits with Alexandru-Sorin Cojoc, founder and editor. You can read more about us or get in touch.
Where our salary figures come from
Every salary figure on this site comes from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), published by the Office for National Statistics. ASHE is an accredited official statistic drawn from a 1% sample of employee jobs taken from HMRC PAYE records, so it is based on what employers actually report paying — not on what people tell us they earn.
We use gross annual pay for all employees. Our current edition is the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 provisional. ONS publishes a new edition each autumn; we reload the data and update the site when it lands.
- National figures come from ASHE Table 14, by four-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC 2020).
- Regional figures come from ASHE Table 15, covering the nine English regions plus Scotland and Wales.
- Gender and working-pattern splits come from the male, female, full-time and part-time tabulations of Table 14.
How job titles map to ONS occupations
ONS measures earnings by SOC occupation group, not by job title. A job advert says “frontend developer”; ONS records “Programmers and software development professionals”. So every job title on this site is mapped to a SOC group by hand, and each page tells you which group it is quoting and how close the match is:
The ONS group means the same job. “Electrician” maps to “Electricians and electrical fitters”.
ONS only measures a wider category containing the role. “Barrister” sits in “Barristers and judges”, which pulls the figure upward.
This mapping is an editorial judgement, and it is the part of our method most open to challenge. If you think a role is mapped to the wrong group, tell us — we will look at it and correct it if you are right.
When ONS withholds a figure
ONS suppresses an estimate when the survey sample behind it is too small to be reliable. Of the 412 occupation groups it defines, 363 have a published annual median, 251 have quartiles, and only 52 have the full range up to the 90th percentile.
Suppression is often partial. ONS may withhold annual pay for an occupation while still publishing an hourly rate for it — that is the case for police officers, where the annual estimate was withdrawn from the 2025 provisional edition, and for dental practitioners. Where that happens we show the hourly figure and label the page clearly, rather than multiplying it into a yearly number nobody measured. Where nothing usable is published at all, we show no figure and say so.
ASHE covers Great Britain. Northern Ireland is not included — earnings there are published separately by NISRA — so our Northern Ireland pages carry no ASHE figure.
ONS also suppresses the detailed percentile spread for most occupations at regional level. Where that happens we either fall back to the broader three-digit occupation group for that region, or to the UK-wide spread, and the page says which one you are looking at.
Reading a median, a mean and a percentile
The median is the midpoint: half of people in the occupation earn less, half earn more. It is the figure we lead with, because a small number of very high salaries drags a mean upward and makes typical pay look higher than it is.
The mean is the arithmetic average. We show it alongside the median because the gap between the two tells you how skewed pay is in that occupation.
A percentile is the salary below which that share of people fall. If the 25th percentile is £30,000, a quarter of people in that occupation earn less than £30,000. Our “Am I underpaid?” tool places your salary by interpolating between the percentiles ONS publishes, so it is an approximation, not an exact rank.
Visitor salary submissions
Anyone can share what they earn anonymously. These submissions are shown separately from the official figures, are clearly labelled as self-reported, and appear only once a role has enough of them to be worth showing at all. They never replace the ONS figure and never feed into it.
Submissions made before this site moved to ONS data are excluded from everything published here.
Our calculators
The take-home pay calculator applies HMRC income tax bands, National Insurance rates and pension relief for the stated tax year. The cost-of-living comparisons combine take-home pay with published rent and living cost estimates for each city. Both are estimates for guidance and are not tax or financial advice.
Editorial and AI policy
Automation may help draft or structure an article, but publication requires that every figure traces to a named source, that limitations are stated on the page, and that the piece is reviewed by the editor. We do not publish invented figures, unsupported trends, or articles that duplicate an existing page's purpose.
Corrections
If you find an error, an unsupported statement or a figure that looks wrong, email [email protected]. Where a published figure or claim changes as a result, we note the correction on the page.
Licence and attribution
Our salary figures are derived from ONS statistics published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This site contains public sector information licensed under that licence. The ONS does not endorse this site or our interpretation of its data.