Average UK Salary 2026: Mean, Median and What the Data Shows
ONS ASHE 2025 shows median full-time pay hit £39,039. We break down mean vs median, sector splits, the gender pay gap, and regional variation.
What is the average UK salary in 2026?
The median full-time gross annual salary in the UK is £39,039. The mean is £48,512. Both figures come from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 Provisional release (Table 1.7a), sampled in April 2025 and published on 23 October 2025. These are the most authoritative and recent official UK salary figures available.
If you have come here for one number, the median — £39,039 — is the right one to use. Here is why.
Median vs mean: why the number you use matters
Both the median and the mean are legitimate averages, but they tell you different things about the same distribution.
The median is the middle salary. Rank every full-time UK employee by pay, and the person exactly in the middle earns £39,039. Half the workforce earns more; half earns less. The median is resistant to outliers — a hedge-fund manager earning £2 million a year moves it by almost nothing, because she is still one person on one side of the midpoint.
The mean is the total pay bill divided by the number of workers. Because UK pay is distributed unequally — a small number of very high earners sit far to the right of the median — the mean is pulled significantly above the middle. At £48,512, the mean sits £9,473 above the median. That gap is a direct measure of how heavy the upper tail of UK pay is.
The practical rule: use the median when you want to know what a typical worker earns. Use the mean when modelling total payroll spend or aggregate earnings across a workforce.
ONS treats the median as its headline figure for ASHE. So do we. All comparisons on this page use the median unless stated.
The 2025 headline figures
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Median full-time gross annual pay | £39,039 |
| Mean full-time gross annual pay | £48,512 |
"Full-time" means 30 or more paid hours per week. "Gross" means before income tax, National Insurance, and pension contributions. "Annual" means ASHE's April weekly figure annualised over 52 weeks.
The 25 highest-paid occupations in the UK all sit well above the median — the roles at the very top (chief executives, specialist doctors, marketing directors) pull the mean upward without shifting the median much. Conversely, the lowest-paid UK occupations sit well below both figures, with the accommodation and food sector at a median of £28,687.
UK salary by industry sector
Pay varies substantially across the 12 broad industry sections ONS uses. The table below shows median full-time gross annual pay for each section, sourced from ASHE 2025 Provisional Table 4.7a. No values are suppressed for these sections.
| Industry section (SIC 2007) | Median full-time gross annual |
|---|---|
| Finance and insurance (K) | £58,488 |
| Information and communication (J) | £52,264 |
| Professional, scientific and technical (M) | £46,208 |
| Construction (F) | £43,100 |
| Public administration and defence (O) | £40,879 |
| Transportation and storage (H) | £40,056 |
| Education (P) | £39,999 |
| Manufacturing (C) | £38,956 |
| Administrative and support services (N) | £36,109 |
| Human health and social work (Q) | £35,744 |
| Wholesale and retail trade (G) | £33,158 |
| Accommodation and food service (I) | £28,687 |
The top-to-bottom spread is £29,801. A finance worker at the median earns more than twice a hospitality worker at the median.
A few things stand out. Public administration (£40,879) and education (£39,999) sit close to the national median, and both sectors are overwhelmingly public-sector employers. Manufacturing (£38,956) sits marginally below the national figure. Health and social work (£35,744) is notably below the median despite including NHS consultants — because it also includes large volumes of care workers, support staff, and community nursing roles whose pay sits well below the sector median.
Public sector vs private sector
ASHE 2025 Provisional Table 13.7a splits full-time pay by employer type:
| Sector | Median full-time gross annual |
|---|---|
| Public sector | £40,806 |
| Private sector | £38,396 |
Public-sector workers earn a £2,410 premium at the median. This has been a persistent feature of the UK pay distribution for over a decade, and it partly reflects the occupational mix: public services are heavily weighted towards healthcare, education, and public administration roles that cluster at or above the national median.
The premium is not uniform across the distribution. At the top, private-sector senior management and finance roles significantly outpay their public equivalents. The public-sector advantage is strongest in the middle and lower deciles.
Gender pay gap
The UK full-time gender pay gap measured by ONS ASHE 2025 is 6.9%. Measured across all employees (including part-time), the gap rises to 12.8%.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Median full-time hourly pay — men | £20.27 |
| Median full-time hourly pay — women | £18.87 |
| Full-time gender pay gap | 6.9% |
| All-employee gender pay gap | 12.8% |
The difference between the two gaps is explained largely by hours-of-work and occupational segregation: women are more likely to work part-time, and part-time work in the UK is concentrated in lower-paid roles and sectors. When you control for full-time hours, the gap narrows substantially — though it does not disappear.
The gender pay gap is not the same as equal-pay discrimination (paying different wages for the same job, which is unlawful under the Equality Act 2010). It is a structural measure of how men and women are distributed across roles, seniority levels, sectors, and working patterns.
How real wages have moved: 2020–2025
Nominal salary figures tell only part of the story. What matters for living standards is whether pay has kept pace with prices.
The table below shows the nominal full-time median alongside the CPIH (Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs) twelve-month rate for each April — the measure ONS uses when assessing real-earnings growth.
| ASHE year (April pay) | Nominal full-time median | CPIH (April, 12m) | Year-on-year nominal growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | £31,487 † | 0.9% | — |
| 2021 | £31,224 † | 1.6% | −0.8% |
| 2022 | £33,061 | 7.8% | +5.9% |
| 2023 | £35,004 | 7.8% | +5.9% |
| 2024 | £37,439 | 3.0% | +7.0% |
| 2025 | £39,039 | 4.1% | +4.3% |
† 2020 and 2021 figures are extracted from ASHE Revised Table 1.7a in binary format and carry a ±£100 uncertainty margin. All other years are from standard ASHE Revised or Provisional Table 1.7a.
The real-wage story across this period falls into three phases.
2020–2021. A nominal decline of 0.8%, combined with 1.6% CPIH, produced a real-terms fall. This reflects pandemic-era pay compression and composition effects as lower-paid workers temporarily left measured employment.
2021–2023. Nominal pay grew at roughly 5.9% per year, but CPIH ran at 7.8% in both 2022 and 2023. Real wages fell sharply across those two years — the sharpest sustained real-wage decline in the ASHE series. The cost-of-living crisis eroded the purchasing power of pay faster than employers were raising it.
2023–2025. Nominal growth accelerated to 7.0% in 2024 and ran at 4.3% in 2025, while CPIH moderated to 3.0% and 4.1% respectively. Real wages recovered substantially in 2024. By April 2025 the median had broadly regained the ground lost in 2022–2023, but the margin between nominal growth and inflation remains narrow — there is no sustained real-terms windfall in the 2025 figures.
Regional variation
The national median of £39,039 masks significant regional differences. Full-time pay in London and the South East sits well above the national figure; the North East, Wales, and Northern Ireland sit below it. For London specifically — the region with the largest premium above the national figure — see our London salary guide.
What the average actually looks like
It is worth pausing on what the median represents. A £39,039 salary is not unusual or unremarkable — it is the middle of the UK full-time workforce. In 2025, it equates to roughly £3,253 per month gross.
The median sits closest to occupations like a software developer in the first few years of their career, a mid-band nurse on Agenda for Change Band 6, or a senior care worker in a residential setting. These roles give a feel for who the national median represents — not an abstract figure, but a cluster of everyday professional roles at the centre of UK pay.
For context: earning above £48,512 (the mean) puts someone in roughly the top third of full-time earners. Earning above the p90 — a figure not published for the aggregate in Table 1.7a, but implied by the sector and occupation distributions — requires a senior professional or managerial role.
Methodology and sources
Data source. All salary figures on this page are taken directly from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 Provisional release, published 23 October 2025. Figures come from the following tables:
- Table 1.7a — full-time gross annual pay, all employees (median and mean; headline anchor figures)
- Table 4.7a — full-time gross annual pay by industry section (SIC 2007 sections)
- Table 13.7a — full-time gross annual pay by public/private sector
- Gender pay gap hourly figures — ASHE 2025 Provisional gender pay gap tables
What "median full-time gross annual pay" means. Median: the middle salary — half of full-time employees earn more, half earn less. Full-time: 30 or more paid hours per week. Gross: before income tax, employee NI, and pension contributions. Annual: ASHE's April weekly figure annualised over 52 weeks.
Real-wage methodology. Nominal ASHE medians compared against CPIH 12-month rate (ONS time series L55O) for April of each survey year. 2020 and 2021 nominal figures are extracted from ASHE Revised binary tables and carry a ±£100 uncertainty margin; 2022–2025 are confirmed from standard ASHE Revised and Provisional Table 1.7a files.
Suppression policy. No values in the sector, public/private, or gender tables above were suppressed by ONS. Where ONS does suppress a value due to small sample size, this site shows data suppressed rather than substituting a zero, estimate, or prior-year figure.
Full citation. Office for National Statistics (2025). Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings: 2025 Provisional (Tables 1.7a, 4.7a, 13.7a). Published 23 October 2025. Used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
ASHE is updated annually each October. When the 2026 Provisional figures are published, this page will be updated.
Topics: average-salary, uk-salary, ons-ashe-2025, median-wage, salary-data