Median Salary UK: £39,039 Full-Time, £32,890 All Employees

Updated 7 September 2026 with the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, the most recent official data. ASHE 2026 has a provisional ONS release date of October 2026; we will update every figure here on the day it publishes.

There are two median UK salaries, and most pages quote one of them without telling you which. For full-time employees it is £39,039 a year. For all employees, full-time and part-time together, it is £32,890. Both come from the same Office for National Statistics release and both describe April 2025; the full-time figure is 19% higher than the all-employees one.

That gap is the single most common error in this corner of the internet. A page that answers “what is the median UK salary?” with one number and no definition is not wrong so much as unusable: you cannot tell whether you are being compared with people who work the same hours you do. This page gives you both, explains which one you want, and then does the thing the national figure cannot — breaks it down to the job you actually do.

The figures on this page

ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, April 2025 (provisional), published 23 October 2025. Gross annual pay for employees on adult rates whose pay was unaffected by absence.

Every ONS number quoted anywhere on this page comes from this table or the two that follow. If a figure is not in one of them, it is not on the page.

What the median actually means

Line every employee up in order of pay and walk to the person standing in the middle. What they earn is the median. Half the workforce earns more, half earns less, and that is the whole definition.

The mean — what almost everyone means by “average” — is a different calculation: add up everyone’s pay and divide by the number of people. It sounds more thorough and it is much easier to distort. One chief executive on seven figures moves the mean for their entire industry; they move the median not at all, because the person in the middle is still the person in the middle.

You can see the distortion in the first table: the full-time mean sits well clear of the full-time median, because the top of the UK pay distribution stretches a very long way and the bottom cannot go below zero. Any distribution shaped like that will have a mean above its median. It is why the ONS leads on the median in every ASHE release, and why a headline built on the mean quietly tells most readers they are underpaid when they are not.

The practical rule: if you want to know whether your salary is normal, use the median. If you want to know what a workforce costs an employer, use the mean.

Full-time or all employees: the distinction most pages get wrong

The first table on this page also carries a part-time median, and it is very low. That is not a scandal, and it is the reason the all-employees median sits so far below the full-time one.

ASHE reports gross pay as actually paid. It does not scale part-time earnings up to a full-time equivalent. So a person working three days a week appears at roughly three-fifths of their own full-time rate, and the 6.7 million part-time employee jobs in the survey drag the combined median down by pure arithmetic, not by unfairness. The gap between the two headline figures is mostly a gap in hours worked.

This matters when you compare yourself against a number you found online:

• If you work full-time, the full-time median is your comparison. Using the all-employees figure will make you feel better than the data warrants.
• If you work part-time, neither national figure is much use, because your pay depends on your hours. Compare hourly rates instead, or read our analysis of the part-time pay penalty.
• If you are looking at a whole occupation — how much do care workers earn? — the choice of measure can change the answer by half. The next section shows exactly how.

The median salary by occupation

This is where a national median stops being useful. The ONS publishes annual pay for 412 occupations, and CareerMetrics holds all of them. Here is a spread of familiar jobs, with both measures side by side.

Read the two columns against each other and the full-time-versus-all-employees point stops being pedantry. For train drivers, software developers and electricians the columns almost touch, because nearly everyone in those jobs works full-time. For sales and retail assistants the all-employees median sits 42% below the full-time one — a job done overwhelmingly part-time, where quoting the wrong measure understates full-time pay by more than two-fifths. Kitchen and catering assistants show the same pattern. This is why “the average salary for a retail assistant” is a question with two defensible and wildly different answers.

The other thing the occupation data reveals is how unrepresentative the national median is of any individual job. Of the 374 occupations where the ONS publishes a full-time median, 234 — around three in five — sit below the national full-time median. The national figure is not the middle of the occupations; it is the middle of the people, and the biggest occupations are not the best-paid ones.

All 412 are on the occupation index, each with its own percentile range and ten-year trend.

The median salary by region

Only London and, marginally, the South East and Scotland sit above the UK full-time median. Everywhere else is below it — which means that for most of the country, being told you earn “below the national average” is a statement about where you live at least as much as about what you do. London’s full-time median is more than 40% above the North East’s. Whether that survives contact with London rents is a separate question, taken up in cost of living versus salary by region and in our regional pay gap analysis.

Where the number comes from

ASHE is not a survey of people. It is a 1% sample of PAYE records, filled in by employers from their own payroll systems, which is why it is far more reliable than any figure built from self-reported salaries or job adverts. The headline figures cover employees on adult rates whose pay was not affected by absence in the reference period — April of the survey year.

Two consequences worth knowing. First, ASHE measures employee jobs, not people: if someone holds two jobs, both appear. Second, the figures are always about the previous April, so the “current” median is up to eighteen months old by the time the next release replaces it. For a more recent read on the direction of pay, the ONS labour market release reports average weekly earnings growth every month.

When the next figures land

The ONS has given a provisional release date of October 2026 for Employee earnings in the UK: 2026, which will carry the April 2026 figures. The 2025 edition was published on 23 October 2025.

We are not going to predict the 2026 number, and you should be wary of any page that does. What we will do is update every figure on this page on the day the release goes out, from the ONS tables themselves.

What to do with this

• Stop comparing yourself with the national median. It is the middle of a workforce that includes chief executives and teaching assistants. Where Do I Stand? puts your salary against people doing your specific job in your region, from the same ONS data used here.
• Check which measure a number is using before you trust it. Full-time or all employees; median or mean. Four combinations — and in a part-time-heavy occupation the full-time median can sit more than 70% above the all-employees one.
• Look at your occupation’s trajectory, not just its median. A job with a median below the national figure can still out-earn one above it over a career. The Salary Forecast and Lifetime Earnings tools work on the full curve.
• For the wider picture, our Average UK Salary 2026 breakdown adds age, industry, sector and the gender pay gap from the same release.

Sources: Office for National Statistics, “Employee earnings in the UK: 2025”, published 23 October 2025 (provisional April 2025 estimates). Headline medians, means and percentiles: ASHE Table 1.7a, Annual pay — Gross, sheets All, Full-Time and Part-Time. Regional figures: ASHE Table 7.7a, place of work, sheets Full-Time and All. Occupation figures: ASHE Table 14.7a, as held in the CareerMetrics occupation dataset. Bulletin: Employee earnings in the UK: 2025. Next release: Employee earnings in the UK: 2026, provisional release date October 2026. Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0.