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Annual report · 2026

What Britain really earns

Every figure here comes from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings — a survey of PAYE records covering 25.2 million employee jobs. No estimates of our own, no self-reported numbers.

By · ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2026 provisional

The headline number

Median gross annual pay, all employees

£34,229

▲ 4.2% on the previous year

Half of UK employees earn less than £34,229, half earn more. The mean is £42,926 — higher, because a relatively small number of very large salaries pull the average up. That gap between median and mean is the first thing worth understanding about UK pay: the "average" salary you see quoted is not what a typical person earns.

Bottom 10%

£12,000

earn less than this

Lower quarter

£22,932

earn less than this

Upper quarter

£50,457

earn more than this

Top 10%

£73,791

earn more than this

Full-time and part-time

Most pay comparisons quietly mix the two, which distorts everything downstream. Full-time median pay is £40,911; part-time is £15,192. The difference is mostly hours worked, not hourly rates — which matters enormously when reading the gender figures below.

The top and bottom of the scale

Occupations with at least 20,000 jobs and a precise ONS estimate (sampling error of 10% or less), so these are real career paths rather than statistical noise.

Highest paid

  1. 1 Specialist medical practitioners £98,542
  2. 2 Information technology directors £95,486
  3. 3 Marketing, sales and advertising directors £92,353
  4. 4 Functional managers and directors n.e.c. £76,761
  5. 5 Train and tram drivers £73,874
  6. 6 Head teachers and principals £72,634
  7. 7 Financial managers and directors £67,113
  8. 8 IT business analysts, architects and systems designers £63,820
  9. 9 Electrical engineers £62,292
  10. 10 Business and financial project management professionals £61,137

Lowest paid

  1. 1 School midday and crossing patrol occupations £4,655
  2. 2 Waiters and waitresses £11,412
  3. 3 Cleaners and domestics £12,132
  4. 4 Kitchen and catering assistants £13,397
  5. 5 Beauticians and related occupations £15,028
  6. 6 Sales and retail assistants £15,238
  7. 7 Hairdressers and barbers £15,247
  8. 8 Retail cashiers and check-out operators £15,762
  9. 9 Housekeepers and related occupations £17,459
  10. 10 Educational support assistants £18,128

Many of the lowest figures reflect part-time hours rather than low hourly rates — bar staff and waiting work is overwhelmingly part-time, so annual pay looks far lower than the hourly rate implies.

Who got a rise, and who didn't

Change in median pay against the previous year.

Biggest rises

Insurance underwriters

£47,330

+21.8%

Chartered architectural technologists, planning officers and consultants

£41,502

+17.6%

IT network professionals

£56,096

+16.8%

Actuaries, economists and statisticians

£59,799

+16%

Customer service managers

£37,653

+15%

Waiters and waitresses

£11,412

+13.5%

Pharmacy and optical dispensing assistants

£20,142

+12.2%

Kitchen and catering assistants

£13,397

+11.6%

Information technology professionals n.e.c.

£56,664

+11.1%

Chefs

£29,410

+10.5%

Biggest falls

Production managers and directors in manufacturing

£50,802

-3.9%

Routine inspectors and testers

£32,916

-3.2%

IT quality and testing professionals

£44,244

-3.1%

Arts officers, producers and directors

£38,040

-3%

Train and tram drivers

£73,874

-3%

Pharmaceutical technicians

£27,505

-2.3%

Other educational professionals n.e.c

£32,870

-2.2%

Farm workers

£27,008

-1.8%

Animal care services occupations n.e.c.

£22,715

-0.9%

Mental health nurses

£39,660

-0.7%

A falling median doesn't always mean pay cuts. If an occupation takes on many junior staff in a year, its median falls even when nobody's salary went down.

The gender pay gap

Men — median

£39,997

Women — median

£29,133

Gap

27.2%

This is not the figure usually quoted in the news. The ONS headline gender pay gap measures hourly pay excluding overtime for full-time employees, and is far smaller. The 27.2% above is the gap in gross annual pay across all employees, full-time and part-time together — larger mainly because women are much more likely to work part-time and are therefore paid for fewer hours. Both are real; they answer different questions, and quoting one while meaning the other is the most common mistake in pay-gap reporting.

Where the gap is widest

Full-time annual pay. Of 139 occupations where ONS publishes a precise men's and women's median (sampling error of 10% or less for both).

Financial managers and directors £92,586 £67,246 27.4%
Production, factory and assembly supervisors £41,397 £32,200 22.2%
Marketing and commercial managers £62,000 £48,549 21.7%
Business associate professionals n.e.c. £45,332 £35,859 20.9%
Programmers and software development professionals £61,410 £48,775 20.6%
CAD, drawing and architectural technicians £36,750 £29,539 19.6%

And where it reverses

Occupations where women's median pay is at or above men's.

Personal assistants and other secretaries £36,341 £36,993 -1.8%
Call and contact centre occupations £28,727 £29,187 -1.6%
Security guards and related occupations £35,238 £35,612 -1.1%
Laboratory technicians £29,191 £29,354 -0.6%

A pay gap is a difference in average pay between two groups. It is not by itself evidence of unequal pay for the same job, which is unlawful in the UK — gaps are driven largely by which occupations and hours each group works.

Pay by region

The midpoint of each region's published occupation medians.

London £42,069 South East £36,653 Scotland £36,364 East of England £35,836 Yorkshire and The Humber £35,473 South West £34,842 West Midlands £34,445 North West £34,015 East Midlands £33,964 Wales £31,966 North East £30,477

Northern Ireland is absent because ASHE covers Great Britain; NISRA publishes it separately. A region can rank high simply by containing more high-paying occupations, so comparing job by job tells you more than the headline.

Where do you sit in all this?

The national picture is only useful once you can place yourself in it.

Find your percentile Browse by job title Take-home pay

About this report

All figures are gross annual pay from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2026 provisional. ASHE is an accredited official statistic based on a 1% sample of employee jobs drawn from HMRC PAYE records. Rankings exclude occupations with fewer than 20,000 jobs, because small groups swing sharply between editions, and any figure ONS rates above a 10% sampling error. Where ONS suppresses an estimate for quality reasons, it is left out rather than filled in. Our full methodology explains how job titles map to ONS occupation groups.

Published by AXSystem Ltd (Company No. 17085060). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The ONS does not endorse this analysis. Figures are estimates and are not financial advice. Free to quote with attribution and a link to this page.