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UK Tech Salaries 2026: What Employers Actually Advertise

By SalaryShown. Published 28 October 2026

UK tech salaries in October 2026 range from a median advertised £50k for DevOps engineers to £115k for AI product managers, based on 4,042 live UK tech job ads. Of those, 2,484 show a salary. This guide pulls together what those ads say by role, seniority, location, work pattern and employer type, and where the figures are too thin to lean on.

All figures were taken from salaryshown.com on 28 October 2026. "Advertised salary" means the figure or range printed in the job ad. It is base pay as published, not what anyone was eventually offered or paid. Where an ad gives a range, we use its midpoint.

The headline numbers

We track UK tech roles from about 150 startup job boards, plus roles from other UK employers and recruitment agencies found through Reed. Agency ads are kept only when they state a salary, so their share of ads showing pay is 100% by construction and says nothing about how agencies behave.

Strip out the agencies and the picture for employers themselves is 402 salaried ads out of 1,960, about 21%. Roughly four in five ads from employers leave the figure out. Our transparency post covers that in detail, and which employers show the salary breaks it down by source.

The share also varies by role. DevOps, cloud and IT has the highest share of employer ads showing pay at 36%. Machine learning engineering, data engineering and data science sit at 12% to 13%.

What each role advertises

This is the main table. Medians come from each role's salary guide, using ads that publish a salary. The typical range is the middle half of those ads.

Read it with the sample sizes in mind. AI researcher has 19 priced ads and AI product manager 26, so one extra frontier-lab ad can move those rows. Software engineering and DevOps have hundreds of priced ads, which makes them the steadier numbers.

Each row has a live page: the software engineer, machine learning engineer, data engineer, data scientist, data analyst, DevOps engineer, cyber security, product manager, AI product manager, AI researcher, UX designer and technology consultant guides all update daily. The highest-paying roles post ranks the same roles using figures taken on 22 October, so a few medians there differ from this table. The gap is mostly because more salaried ads have been added since.

Data roles side by side

Data scientists advertise a median of £75k, data engineers £72k and data analysts £58k. The data scientist and data engineer typical ranges are the same, £58k to £85k.

The difference shows up by seniority. Data scientist medians run from £42k at junior (4 ads) through £60k at mid-level (28) to £80k at senior (12). Data engineer medians are £68k at mid-level (59 ads), £70k at senior (20) and £85k at lead or staff (18). Junior and senior data engineer samples are small or absent, so treat the upper rows as indicative. Data engineer vs data scientist salary goes through the comparison role by role.

Pay by seniority

Across all roles and sources, advertised pay rises with seniority, apart from senior and lead sharing a median.

Two things stand out. Mid-level is by far the biggest group of priced ads, with 1,374 across all sources, so the all-UK mid-level median of £50k is the best-supported number in the table. And senior and lead or staff roles share the same all-UK median of £70k, whereas startups advertise £103k and £132k respectively.

The startup junior figure rests on six ads and should not be read as a typical junior salary. The all-UK junior median of £33k, from 109 ads, is the one to use.

Startups against everyone else

Startup ads show a salary less often, but the ones that do advertise higher figures. The table puts the startup median next to the all-UK median for each role.

In every role the startup median is higher. We do not know why, and the data cannot say. Some of it is likely mix, because only about 18% of startup ads show pay and the all-UK figures include many agency and corporate ads. Several startup samples are under 10 ads, which is too few to compare firmly: tech consulting (7), analytics (6) and data engineering (8) especially. Software engineering is the best-supported row, with 80 startup ads against 941 overall.

London against the rest of the UK

Across all priced ads, London advertises more. This calculation is ours, from the midpoints in the public job feed at salaryshown.com/jobs.json, and it mixes every role and seniority together.

Treat the gap as a headline, not a London premium. London has a different mix of roles and seniority from the rest of the UK, and 633 of its ads versus 1,851 elsewhere come from different sources in different proportions. A like-for-like comparison would hold role and level fixed, and that is the next piece of analysis to do properly. For a single role, each salary guide shows London against the rest of the UK, and there are job lists for tech jobs in London and tech jobs outside London.

Outside London, the cities with the most open roles in our data are Manchester (115), Bristol (104), Birmingham (57) and Cambridge (45). Bristol has 73 startup roles and Cambridge 31.

Remote, hybrid and on-site

The ads state a work pattern for 2,166 of the 4,042 roles. For the rest it is not stated.

Remote and hybrid ads share the same median here, £67.5k, and on-site is £15k lower. The same caution as for London applies: these are all roles pooled together, so the pattern could reflect which roles tend to be advertised as remote rather than anything about remote work itself. The remote tech jobs list has the current roles.

Who is hiring and who shows pay

Some of the largest hirers show no salary at all. The ones with the most open roles and no priced ads include Deliveroo (55 roles), Wayve (50), Humanoid (37), Faculty (34), Lendable (25) and ElevenLabs (25). At the other end, Anthropic has 31 of 32 roles priced with a median of £290k, Monzo has 26 of 30 with £131k, and Kaluza has 17 of 21 with £110k.

Among employers with three or more roles, Riverlane, incident.io, Accurx, GoCardless and Reflexivity show a salary on every open role. The full list is on the market dashboard, and the employers not showing a salary names those with 10 or more roles and none priced.

The top of the market is narrow. The highest advertised salaries on the site are research engineering roles at Anthropic in London, at up to £640k. Roles like these stretch the top of the range for machine learning and AI research without changing the median much.

What to do with these numbers

If you are job hunting, use the median for your role and level as a starting point, then check the number of ads behind it. A median from 700 ads is a firmer anchor than one from 19.

If an ad shows no salary, the role's page gives you a range to compare against, and how to find the salary when a job ad doesn't show one covers asking for the band.

If you are an employer, about four in five employer ads in our data leave the salary out, so printing one is uncommon.

Limits of this data

• Ads, not offers. Advertised pay is what an employer prints. It is not the final offer or a total package.
• Ads that show pay are a subset. Roles with a published figure may not look like roles without one, especially at startups where fewer than one in five show pay.
• Agencies are filtered. We keep agency ads only when they state a salary, and we treat figures outside £18k to £400k, or ranges whose top is more than four times the bottom, as errors and drop them.
• Pooled comparisons. The London and work-pattern tables combine every role and level, so they are not like-for-like.
• Small samples. Anywhere a row rests on fewer than about 10 ads we say so, and the figure should be read as indicative.
• Snapshot. The market moves daily and the numbers on the live pages will differ from the ones here.

Where to look next

The salary guide index lists every role. The market dashboard has the up-to-date version of the tables above, and all open jobs can be filtered by role, level, location and work pattern. There is also a free Monday newsletter.