What do data roles pay?

Where the figures come from

The pay figures come from the Office for National Statistics’ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025, the provisional results published on 23 October 2025. ASHE is based on a 1% sample of jobs from HMRC’s PAYE records, so it reports what employers actually paid, not what job adverts say. We use Table 14.7a for the UK, and Tables 15 (3).7a, 15 (4).7a and 3.7a for the regions.

We show gross annual pay for full-time employee jobs in the tax year to 5 April 2025. Gross means before tax and National Insurance, and it includes bonuses and overtime. ONS only counts employees on adult rates who’d been in the same job for more than a year, and ASHE doesn’t cover the self-employed. These are provisional figures: ONS revises them a year later.

Occupations aren’t job titles

ONS groups jobs using the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC 2020) and publishes pay for each group, not for job titles. To match each role in the tool to a group, we used ONS’s own SOC 2020 coding index (version 14, published 27 August 2026), which lists the job titles ONS puts in each group.

Each group also holds other jobs. The BI group includes management consultants, and the data scientist group includes actuaries and economists. Employers also describe the same job in different ways. So treat each group as a close match, not an exact one.

What the chart shows

A percentile is the pay that a given share of jobs falls below. For example, 25 in every 100 full-time jobs in the group pay less than the 25th percentile. The median (the 50th percentile) is ONS’s preferred measure of typical pay. The chart draws the usual range (10th to 90th percentile), the middle half (25th to 75th) and the median, all to scale.

When you check a figure, we show which of ONS’s published percentiles it falls between, and describe it as below most (under the 10th), in the lower part of the usual range (10th to 40th), around the middle (40th to 60th), in the upper part (60th to 90th) or above most (over the 90th).

How reliable the figures are

ASHE is a sample, so every figure has a margin of error. ONS rates each one by its coefficient of variation: precise (5% or less), reasonably precise (over 5% to 10%) or acceptable (over 10% to 20%). The tool shows the rating next to any figure that isn’t rated precise. ONS doesn’t publish figures with a coefficient of variation over 20%, and we never show or estimate them. For example, ONS doesn’t publish a 90th percentile for data analysts, so that bar stops at the 80th.

How we estimate regional pay

ONS publishes a median for most of these groups in most regions, but not the spread of pay, and those regional medians come from small samples. So regional figures in the tool are our estimates, worked out like this:

1. Start with the UK figures for the group, for example Data analysts.
2. Look at how pay for the wider three-digit group it belongs to compares in the region. For Business associate professionals (SOC 354), the median in London was £42,918, against £36,981 across the UK: 16% higher (ASHE 2025 provisional, Tables 15 (3).7a and 14.7a, published 23 October 2025).
3. Scale every UK figure by that amount and round to the nearest £100.

This assumes pay across the whole range differs by the same proportion as the wider group’s median, which is a simplification. We tested it against the 18 regional medians for these occupations that ONS rates reasonably precise (Table 15 (4).7a): our estimates were 5% out on average and 15% at most. Whenever ONS publishes its own regional median, the tool shows it next to our estimate. ONS doesn’t publish these groups for Northern Ireland, so for Northern Ireland the tool shows the UK figures instead.

Graduate starting salaries

Because ASHE counts staff at every level and leaves out anyone in their first year in a job, it isn’t a guide to starting pay on its own. For context, the Institute of Student Employers (ISE) reported a typical (median) graduate starting salary of £33,000 in its Student Recruitment Survey 2025 (October 2025). That covers graduate programmes at ISE members, which are mostly large employers across all sectors, so it isn’t every graduate job. It sits in the lower part of the range for data analysts, BI and business analysts and software developers, and below the range for data engineers and data scientists. The ISE’s figures for individual sectors, such as digital and IT, are only available to its members, so we haven’t used them.

What it can’t tell you

• Whether an offer is right for you. That depends on the job, the employer, the place, the whole package and your experience.
• What a particular employer pays. We don’t use job adverts or salary sites.
• Part-time pay, or pay for the self-employed.

Contains public sector information from the Office for National Statistics, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Every figure was checked in September 2026.