Our figures
Where our figures come from
Every number in the Toolkit comes from a named, published source, with the date we last checked it shown next to it. This page explains where they come from, how we check them and when they’re updated.
Last updated 29 September 2026
The short version
- Pay comes from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), not from job adverts or salary websites.
- Costs, times and funding come from each provider’s or the government’s own website, and each one links to the page we used.
- Every figure shows when we last checked it. All of them were checked in September 2026.
- We say what a figure is, such as a median or a range of the courses we checked, and what it can’t tell you.
- If you spot something out of date, email coaching@deeplink.uk and we’ll correct it.
Figures by tool
| Tool | Figures | Where they come from | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Salary Checker | Gross annual pay for full-time employee jobs, by occupation and region | ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025, provisional results published 23 October 2025, Tables 14, 15 and 3. The page shows the figures as tables and explains our regional estimates | September 2026 |
| Salary Checker | A typical graduate starting salary, for context | Institute of Student Employers, Student Recruitment Survey 2025 (October 2025) | September 2026 |
| Options Compared | Master’s fees, the Master’s Loan, bootcamp prices, Skills Bootcamp rules, a certification exam fee, and Deeplink Coaching’s own prices | Each university’s, provider’s or GOV.UK page, linked next to the figure | September 2026 |
| Parents’ Check | How long university careers services help graduates, Skills Bootcamp rules, and the free courses it mentions | The universities’, the Department for Education’s and the course providers’ own pages, linked next to each sentence | September 2026 |
| Job Ad Decoder | The National Living Wage (£12.71 an hour for people aged 21 and over, from 1 April 2026), used to flag hourly pay below it | GOV.UK, National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates | September 2026 |
The Readiness Check, Portfolio Check, LinkedIn Check, Interview Warm-up and Analyst or Engineer? quiz don’t quote figures. Their scores come from rules explained on each tool’s page, under “What we check, and why”. A score is a guide, not a prediction.
How we check a figure
- Go to the source itself. The publisher’s own page or dataset, not a summary of it elsewhere.
- Record exactly what it is. For pay: which table, which measure (the median or a percentile), full-time or all, and which year. For prices: which course, for whom (home students, full-time) and for which year of entry.
- Link it and date it. The tool shows the source and the month we checked it next to the figure. In Options Compared and the Parents’ Check, the Toolkit’s own tests fail if a figure has no source or date.
- Leave out what we can’t check. Where a provider’s UK price couldn’t be confirmed, we left it out rather than guess, and say so.
Our own prices
Options Compared and the Parents’ Check include Deeplink Coaching, which makes the Toolkit. Its figures come from Deeplink Coaching’s own pricing and Launch Tracks pages, described with the same rules and the same kinds of sources as every other route, and always with the full price, including the Job Payment.
When figures are updated
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Each October or November | ONS publishes new ASHE pay figures (revised 2025 and provisional 2026 results are due in October or November 2026). The ISE publishes its graduate salary survey each October. |
| Each April | The National Living Wage changes. |
| Each summer | Master’s fees, the Master’s Loan, and bootcamp and exam prices for the next academic year. |
| Whenever Deeplink Coaching’s prices change | Options Compared and the Parents’ Check change on the same day. |
Licences
Contains public sector information from the Office for National Statistics and GOV.UK, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.