UK Pay Rises by Job 2026: Who's Ahead as the Market Cools

The UK pay market has cooled. The ONS labour market release on 18 August 2026 put annual growth in regular pay at 3.5% for April to June, worth just 0.5% after inflation. Vacancies have slipped to 707,000, the number of payrolled employees is down 94,000 on the year, and unemployment sits at 4.9%. Inside those averages the public sector is still moving (6.1% regular pay growth) while the private sector has slowed to 2.8%.

But a national average tells you what happened to the typical worker, not to your job. The most detailed picture of pay by occupation is the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, and the latest edition, taken in April 2025, shows just how unevenly the last round of rises was shared out: one occupation’s median pay rose by a quarter, another’s fell by almost 6%. With ASHE 2026 not due until the autumn, that survey is the best job-level evidence we have for who came into this cooler market with momentum and who came into it already behind.

We compared the 2024 and 2025 surveys for every occupation with enough jobs to trust the comparison, then read the results against what the market is doing now.

The short version

• 28 occupations came into 2026 off a double-digit rise in median full-time pay; 12 came in with a cash-terms fall.
• The typical occupation rose 5.6%, ahead of the national 4.3% and of CPIH inflation of 4.1% at the time of the survey. 151 of 220 beat inflation; 68 did not.
• The rises cluster in three places: negotiated settlements (train drivers, GPs, teachers), jobs pulled up by the National Living Wage (bar staff, hairdressers, security guards), and specialist roles where demand outruns supply (cyber security, data, environmental work).
• Read against August 2026’s market, the settlement-driven and minimum-wage-driven gains look locked in, the specialist gains are where demand still is, and the exposed group is private-sector white-collar work that was already flat in real terms: financial managers, programmers, IT managers and IT project managers.

How we measured it

ASHE is the ONS’s main survey of employee pay, taken from a 1% sample of PAYE records in April each year. For each occupation we took the median gross annual pay of full-time employees in the 2024 and 2025 surveys and calculated the percentage change. We excluded any occupation with fewer than 20,000 jobs in either year, or where the ONS had suppressed the figure, which left 220 occupations. All codes are on the SOC 2020 classification, so the two years are directly comparable. For the current-market context we use the ONS labour market overview published on 18 August 2026.

Two caveats matter. First, this is the change in the median for an occupation, not the pay rise received by any one person; if the mix of people in a job shifts towards more senior or more junior staff, the median moves even when nobody’s pay does. Second, ASHE is a sample, and for smaller occupations a single year’s figure can bounce around. We have flagged the cases where that looks likely.

The 20 biggest rises in the latest survey

Occupation	Jobs	Median FT pay 2024	Median FT pay 2025	Change
Financial and accounting technicians	29,000	£48,425	£60,575	+25.1%
Arts officers, producers and directors	23,000	£38,073	£45,534	+19.6%
Train and tram drivers	26,000	£63,970	£76,327	+19.3%
Environment professionals	41,000	£37,277	£43,362	+16.3%
Mobile machine drivers and operatives n.e.c.	38,000	£33,010	£37,864	+14.7%
Insurance underwriters	25,000	£36,469	£41,610	+14.1%
Generalist medical practitioners (GPs)	88,000	£48,855	£55,494	+13.6%
Chief executives and senior officials	133,000	£88,350	£99,944	+13.1%
Estimators, valuers and assessors	53,000	£35,138	£39,634	+12.8%
Sports coaches, instructors and officials	62,000	£26,690	£30,108	+12.8%
Cyber security professionals	27,000	£48,583	£54,647	+12.5%
Fitness and wellbeing instructors	25,000	£24,339	£27,273	+12.1%
Elementary administration occupations n.e.c.	23,000	£23,774	£26,631	+12.0%
Bar staff	84,000	£20,741	£23,182	+11.8%
Managers and proprietors in other services n.e.c.	31,000	£41,380	£46,271	+11.8%
Security guards and related occupations	93,000	£30,343	£33,832	+11.5%
Hairdressers and barbers	38,000	£21,789	£24,279	+11.4%
Bar and catering supervisors	31,000	£23,410	£26,019	+11.1%
Health services and public health managers	64,000	£55,609	£61,573	+10.7%
Solicitors and lawyers	127,000	£51,450	£56,977	+10.7%

Just outside the top 20: data analysts (+10.5%, 68,000 jobs) and finance and investment analysts and advisers (+9.7%, 197,000 jobs).

What drove the top of the table

Negotiated settlements working through. The clearest single-year jumps come from occupations where pay is set by collective agreement and a deal landed between the two surveys. Train and tram drivers saw their median full-time pay climb from £63,970 to £76,327 after the long-running dispute on the railways was settled in 2024, and they remain the best-paid occupation in the skilled trades and operative groups by a wide margin. GPs moved from £48,855 to £55,494 as successive contract uplifts fed through to salaried doctors. Among the very largest occupations, primary school teachers rose 7.4% to £45,939 and secondary teachers 5.0% to £47,632, reflecting the 5.5% award that took effect in September 2024.

The National Living Wage floor. The NLW rose 6.7% to £12.21 an hour in April 2025, the month ASHE is taken, and you can see it lifting the whole bottom of the distribution. Bar staff (+11.8%), hairdressers and barbers (+11.4%), bar and catering supervisors (+11.1%) and security guards (+11.5%) all recorded double-digit rises in the full-time median. The effect continues further up the size table: care workers and home carers, with 581,000 jobs the fourth-largest occupation in the country, rose 7.5% to £27,468; sales and retail assistants (895,000 jobs) and warehouse operatives (449,000) both rose 5.5%; cleaners and domestics rose 5.0%.

Specialist demand. Cyber security professionals added 12.5% to reach £54,647, data analysts 10.5% to £38,572, environment professionals 16.3% to £43,362 and insurance underwriters 14.1% to £41,610. These are occupations where a relatively small workforce is chasing growing regulatory and technical workloads, and where the median is moving because employers are paying more for the same role rather than because the mix of staff has changed.

A note on the top line. Financial and accounting technicians tops the table at +25.1%, but with only 29,000 jobs and a median that jumped £12,000 in a single year, we would treat that figure cautiously until ASHE 2026 confirms it. The same applies to arts officers, producers and directors (+19.6% on 23,000 jobs). Both are real data points, but they are the kind of small-occupation swing that can partly reverse the following year.

Will it hold? Reading last year’s winners against this year’s market

The August 2026 figures give a reasonable steer on which of those gains carry forward.

Settlement-driven rises are banked, and the public sector is still leading. Multi-year deals in rail, the NHS and schools do not unwind when the market cools; they are already in the pay scales. The ONS puts public-sector regular pay growth at 6.1% in the three months to June 2026 against 2.8% in the private sector, so occupations whose pay is set by review body or national agreement are, for now, on the better side of the line. The flip side is that the specialist nurses and paramedics figures in the table below show that headline public-sector growth does not reach every grade evenly.

The minimum-wage lift continues, but at a slower pace. The National Living Wage rose again in April 2026, by 4.1% to £12.71, against 6.7% a year earlier. That still pulls up bar staff, care workers, cleaners and retail assistants, and it does so roughly in line with current inflation rather than well ahead of it. Expect the bottom of the distribution to keep pace this year rather than to gain ground.

Specialist demand is where the private-sector growth still is. Employers have pulled back on hiring generally, but the roles still being fought over are the ones that showed up in the table above: cyber security, data and analytics, and regulatory and environmental specialisms. Vacancy data through the summer has shown AI and data skills appearing in a growing share of professional job adverts even as the total number of adverts falls. Cyber security professionals and data analysts are the occupations in our data most likely to repeat.

The exposed group is private-sector white-collar work that was already flat. Financial managers and directors managed 0.8% last year, programmers 4.2%, IT managers 2.6%, IT project managers 0.4% and IT operations technicians −0.3%. Those are large occupations, they are squarely in the 2.8% private-sector bracket, and the technology sector globally has already cut more jobs in 2026 than in the whole of 2025. If your pay review this autumn is below 3.5%, you are in the half of the market that is falling behind.

The jobs that went backwards

Twelve occupations in the comparison saw their median full-time pay fall in cash terms between the two surveys. Against 4.1% CPIH inflation at the time, each of these represents a real-terms cut of between 3% and 10%.

Occupation	Jobs	Median FT pay 2024	Median FT pay 2025	Change
Postal workers, mail sorters and messengers	116,000	£33,582	£31,677	−5.7%
Other educational professionals n.e.c.	22,000	£41,006	£39,114	−4.6%
Air travel assistants	42,000	£29,968	£28,738	−4.1%
Actuaries, economists and statisticians	43,000	£55,178	£53,342	−3.3%
Assemblers (vehicles and metal goods)	40,000	£32,899	£31,919	−3.0%
Other health professionals n.e.c.	91,000	£43,355	£42,079	−2.9%
Office supervisors	57,000	£33,819	£33,174	−1.9%
Specialist nurses	75,000	£45,932	£45,140	−1.7%
Paramedics	40,000	£54,333	£53,818	−0.9%
Plumbers and heating and ventilating installers	58,000	£38,101	£37,881	−0.6%
IT operations technicians	69,000	£35,359	£35,259	−0.3%

A fall in the median does not always mean established staff took a pay cut. Postal work and vehicle assembly have both seen workforce churn, and a year in which experienced leavers are replaced by new starters on lower grades will drag the median down even if every individual’s pay went up. The specialist nurses and paramedics figures are also worth reading alongside the Agenda for Change award, which is paid from April and may only be partly captured in an April survey. Even so, for anyone in these occupations the direction of travel relative to inflation is the thing to note.

Big employers, modest rises

The occupations that employ the most people mostly landed in the middle of the pack, which is why the national full-time median rose only 4.3% (to £39,039) despite all the double-digit movers above, and why the 2026 slowdown to 3.5% feels, for most people, like more of the same.

Occupation	Jobs	Median FT pay 2025	Change
Sales and retail assistants	895,000	£25,056	+5.5%
Other nursing professionals	720,000	£42,300	+4.0%
Care workers and home carers	581,000	£27,468	+7.5%
Elementary storage occupations	503,000	£28,132	+5.5%
Secondary education teaching professionals	466,000	£47,632	+5.0%
Financial managers and directors	430,000	£76,447	+0.8%
Primary education teaching professionals	400,000	£45,939	+7.4%
Programmers and software development professionals	360,000	£56,914	+4.2%
Higher education teaching professionals	246,000	£52,835	+0.5%
IT managers	213,000	£56,438	+2.6%

Two of these stand out for the wrong reasons. Financial managers and directors, 430,000 jobs with a median of £76,447, managed just 0.8%, a real-terms fall of over 3%. Higher education teaching professionals rose 0.5%, continuing a long squeeze on university pay. The programmer figure of +4.2%, essentially flat in real terms, is consistent with the cooler tech hiring market we covered in our look at AI skills and the UK job market: demand has shifted towards specialisms like cyber security and data rather than software development in general.

Where this leaves you

If your occupation is in the top table, the question is whether the rise reached you personally or only the median. Median movements are a useful benchmark in a pay review, particularly in a year when employers are pointing at a 3.5% national figure, and our Where Do I Stand? tool will show you exactly where your current salary sits against the latest percentiles for your job.

If your occupation is below the inflation line, you have had a real-terms cut whether or not your payslip shows a rise, and with unemployment at 4.9% and vacancies falling, the usual remedy of moving employer is harder than it was two years ago. Over a career that compounds: a job whose pay grows 1% a year slower than another ends up roughly 20% behind after two decades. The Salary Forecast tool projects your occupation’s historical growth rate forward so you can see what the trend means over five and ten years, and the Lifetime Earnings calculator puts a cumulative figure on the gap.

We will update this analysis when ASHE 2026 is published in the autumn. In the meantime every occupation in this article links to its own page with the full 2015 to 2025 trend, percentile breakdown and gender pay gap. You can browse all 412 at the occupation index, or start from our overview of average UK salaries in 2026 if you want the national picture first.

Sources: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2024 and 2025 (provisional), Table 14.7a, median gross annual pay for full-time employees by 4-digit SOC 2020 occupation; occupations with fewer than 20,000 employee jobs in either year, or with suppressed estimates, are excluded. Inflation at the time of the survey: ONS CPIH, 12 months to April 2025. Current market: ONS Labour market overview, UK: August 2026 (published 18 August 2026). National Living Wage rates: Low Pay Commission / GOV.UK. Crown copyright, Open Government Licence v3.0.