Salary transparency arguments usually run on vibes. UK job boards are unusually good
here, because advertising a salary is the norm rather than the exception, which means you can just
count. This is 10,764 distinct job postings from 1,583 employers, and what they say they pay.
Almost everything advertises a number
9,815 of the 10,764 postings, 91.2%, have hasSalary set. That is a much higher rate than the US
equivalent and it is what makes the rest of this analysis possible at all.
Of the postings that carry a full band, the period splits three ways: 6,850 annual, 1,640 hourly
and 1,323 daily. The daily bucket is contractor work and it behaves completely differently, so
everything below is the annual set unless stated otherwise.
The middle of the market
Across those 6,850 annual postings:
- median advertised floor: £37,870
- median advertised ceiling: £45,000
- median band width: 18.2% of the floor
That band width is the number I would put in front of anyone about to negotiate. The typical UK
advert opens a range of roughly a fifth above its own starting figure. It is a real range and not
a decorative one, but it is narrower than the "salary negotiable" framing implies.
There is also a meaningful minority that does not offer a range at all: 1,000 postings, 14.6%,
have an identical floor and ceiling. A single figure is a signal about the employer's process,
usually a banded public sector or agency structure, and it tends to mean the number is genuinely
fixed.
By category
Restricted to categories with at least 100 annual postings, ranked on the median advertised
floor:
| category | median floor | postings |
|---|---|---|
| Surveyor | £55,000 | 111 |
| Solicitor | £55,000 | 205 |
| Manager | £50,000 | 1,075 |
| Controller | £50,000 | 432 |
| Accountant | £45,000 | 502 |
| Engineer | £40,000 | 1,080 |
| Teacher | £39,193 | 158 |
| Nurse | £38,000 | 176 |
And at the other end: Security at £24,000 across 210 postings, Marketing at £25,000 across 151,
Apprentice at £26,000 across 153, and Paralegal at £26,000 across 183.
The Paralegal figure sitting at less than half the Solicitor figure, in the same profession and
frequently in the same building, is the sort of thing that is widely known and rarely quantified.
The Marketing number is the one I would treat with most caution, because that category absorbs a
lot of junior coordinator roles that pull the floor down.
Hourly work, for completeness, has a median advertised floor of £14.50.
Remote work, counted
| arrangement | postings |
|---|---|
| On-Site | 6,792 |
| Hybrid | 2,373 |
| Remote | 1,465 |
| NotSpecified | 134 |
Fully remote is 13.6% of postings. Hybrid at 2,373 is not quite double that. Whatever the
discourse says, the UK advertised market is still overwhelmingly on-site, and this field being
explicit rather than inferred from the description text is what makes it countable.
Reading it per employer
Pages here are keyed on the employer, so each one accumulates that employer's observed postings
over time. Hays Specialist Recruitment sits at
https://reapx.dev/data/reed-jobs-scraper/hays-specialist-recruitment-limited/ with 200
observations gathered across 51 separate runs, and Reed's own listings are at
https://reapx.dev/data/reed-jobs-scraper/reed/ with 200 observations across 58 runs.
The heaviest posters in the sample are Reed at 684 postings, IT Career Switch at 441, ITOL Recruit
at 417, Hays at 356 and Reeson Education at 339. That concentration is a warning as much as a
finding: recruitment agencies dominate the volume, the same underlying role can appear under
several agencies at once, and an agency advert's salary band is a pitch rather than an offer.
Weight accordingly if you are building a market rate estimate.
Each row carries the job title, employer and employer id, location and county, category and
subcategory, the salary floor, ceiling and period, full time and part time flags, the remote
option, posting and expiry dates, and a link to the original advert.
Source
The employer index is at https://reapx.dev/data/reed-jobs-scraper/, every page citing the runs
behind it, and the complete row export is at
https://huggingface.co/datasets/reapxdev/reed-jobs-scraper. Deduplicate on jobId before you
aggregate, since a posting observed in several runs will otherwise be counted several times and
skew exactly the medians you came for.
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