The median annual earnings in the United Kingdom was 37,430 British pounds per year in 2024. Annual earnings varied significantly by region, ranging from 47,455 pounds in London to 32,960 pounds in the North East. Along with London, two other areas of the UK had median annual earnings above the UK average; South East England, and Scotland, at 39,038 pounds and 38,315 pounds respectively. Regional Inequality in the UK Various other indicators highlight the degree of regional inequality in the UK, especially between London and the rest of the country. Productivity in London, as measured by output per hour, was 26.2 percent higher than the UK average. By comparison, every other UK region, except the South East, fell below the UK average for productivity. In gross domestic product per head, London was also an outlier. The average GDP per head in the UK was just over 37,000 pounds in 2023, but for London it was almost 64,000 pounds. Again, the South East's GDP per head was slightly above the UK average, with every other region below it. Within London itself, there is also a great degree of inequality. In 2023, for example, the average earnings in Kensington and Chelsea were 964 pounds per week, compared with 675 pounds in Barking and Dagenham. Wages continue to grow in 2025 In March 2025, weekly wages in the UK were growing by around 5.6 percent, or 1.8 percent when adjusted for inflation. For almost two years, wages have grown faster than inflation after a long period where prices were rising faster than wages between 2021 and 2023. This was due to a sustained period of high inflation in the UK, which peaked in October 2022 at 11.1 percent. Although inflation started to slow the following month, it wasn't until June 2023 that wages started to outpace inflation. By this point, the damage caused by high energy and food inflation had led to the the worst Cost of Living Crisis in the UK for a generation.

The median annual earnings for full-time employees in the United Kingdom was approximately 37,430 British pounds in 2024, compared with 34,963 pounds in the previous year. At the start of the provided time period, in 1999, the average full-time salary in the UK was 17,803 pounds per year, with median earnings exceeding 20,000 pounds per year in 2002, and 30,000 by 2019. Wages continue to grow faster than inflation in 2025 Between November 2021 and July 2023 inflation was higher than wage growth in the UK, with wages still outpacing inflation as of March 2025. At the peak of the recent wave of high inflation in October 2022, the CPI inflation rate reached a 41-year-high of 11.1 percent, wages were growing much slower at 6.1 percent. Since that peak, inflation remained persistently high for several months, only dropping below double figures in April 2023, when inflation was 8.7 percent, down from 10.1 percent in the previous month. For 2023 as a whole, the average annual rate of inflation was 7.3 percent but fell to 2.5 percent in 2024, but is forecast to increase to 3.2 percent in 2025. Highest and lowest-paid occupations As of 2023, the highest-paid occupation in the UK was that of Chief Executives and Senior Officials, who had an average weekly pay of approximately, 1,576 pounds. By contrast, the lowest-paid occupation that year was that of retail cashiers, and check-out operators, who earned approximately 383 pounds a week. For industry sectors as a whole, people who worked full-time in the electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply sector had the highest average earnings, at 955 pounds a week, compared with 505 pounds a week in the accommodation and food services sector, the lowest average earnings in 2023.

Every year between 2013 and 2021, employees from the combined Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic group had the lowest average hourly pay out of all ethnic groups.

Full-time workers in London earned an average salary of around 24 British pounds an hour, compared with workers in North East England, who only earned an average of 16.53 pounds an hour, the highest and lowest average hourly wages in the United Kingdom respectively.

Graph and download economic data for Average Weekly Earnings Per Person in the United Kingdom (AWEPPUKQ) from Q1 1919 to Q4 2016 about academic data, United Kingdom, earnings, average, and per capita.

Full-time workers in London earned an average weekly salary of 838.9 British pounds a week in 2023, which was by far the highest of any region of the United Kingdom. The region with the lowest average salary was North East England, at 608.4 pounds a week.

In the 3 years to March 2021, black households were most likely out of all ethnic groups to have a weekly income of under £600.

Annual estimates of paid hours worked and earnings for UK employees by sex, and full-time and part-time, by home-based region to local and unitary authority level.

Update 29-04-2020: The data is now split into two files based on the variable collection frequency (monthly and yearly). Additional variables added: area size in hectares, number of jobs in the area, number of people living in the area.

Context

I have been inspired by Xavier and his work on Barcelona to explore the city of London! 🇬🇧 💂

Content

The datasets is primarily centered around the housing market of London. However, it contains a lot of additional relevant data: - Monthly average house prices - Yearly number of houses - Yearly number of houses sold - Yearly percentage of households that recycle - Yearly life satisfaction - Yearly median salary of the residents of the area - Yearly mean salary of the residents of the area - Monthly number of crimes committed - Yearly number of jobs - Yearly number of people living in the area - Area size in hectares

The data is split by areas of London called boroughs (a flag exists to identify these), but some of the variables have other geographical UK regions for reference (like England, North East, etc.). There have been no changes made to the data except for melting it into a long format from the original tables.

Acknowledgements

The data has been extracted from London Datastore. It is released under UK Open Government License v2 and v3. The underlining datasets can be found here: https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/uk-house-price-index https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/number-and-density-of-dwellings-by-borough https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/subjective-personal-well-being-borough https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/household-waste-recycling-rates-borough https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/earnings-place-residence-borough https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/recorded_crime_summary https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/jobs-and-job-density-borough https://data.london.gov.uk/dataset/ons-mid-year-population-estimates-custom-age-tables

Cover photo by Frans Ruiter from Unsplash

Inspiration

The dataset lends itself for extensive exploratory data analysis. It could also be a great supervised learning regression problem to predict house price changes of different boroughs over time.

Gross weekly and hourly earnings by level of occupation, UK, quarterly, not seasonally adjusted. Labour Force Survey. These are official statistics in development.

In March 2025, the top one percent of earners in the United Kingdom received an average pay of over 16,000 British pounds per month, compared with the bottom ten percent of earners who earned around 800 pounds a month.

In April 2025, employees in the United Kingdom were earning a median pay of ***** British pounds per month, compared with ***** in the previous month.

The average weekly earnings for full-time workers in the United Kingdom was around 728.3 British pounds a week in 2024, an increase on the previous year, when it was 681.7 pounds a week.

75% of households from the Bangladeshi ethnic group were in the 2 lowest income quintiles (after housing costs were deducted) between April 2021 and March 2024.

Between April 2008 and March 2024, households from the Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic groups were the most likely to live in low income out of all ethnic groups, before and after housing costs.

In 2024, the average annual full-time salary for men in the United Kingdom was 40,035 British pounds, compared with 34,000 pounds for women, a difference of just over 6,000 pounds. In the previous year, men earned an average annual salary of 37,382, compared with women who earned 31,672.

Annual estimates of paid hours worked and earnings for UK employees by sex, and full-time and part-time, by region, and public and private sector, and non-profit bodies and mutual associations. Hourly and weekly estimates are provided for the pay period that included a specified date in April. They relate to employees on adult rates of pay, whose earnings for the survey pay period were not affected by absence. Estimates for 2020 and 2021 include employees who have been furloughed under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS). Annual estimates are provided for the tax year that ended on 5th April in the reference year. They relate to employees on adult rates of pay who have been in the same job for more than a year.