Home / Blog

Which UK Tech Employers Show the Salary? (October 2026)

By SalaryShown. Published 22 October 2026

Only 17% of the 1,203 open roles at the UK startups we track show a salary. Across direct employers advertising through Reed the figure is 29%. Recruitment agencies are at 100%, but only because we drop agency ads that don't state pay. All figures are from live UK tech job ads on 22 October 2026.

If you are job hunting, the practical point is that most startup ads leave you to ask. The tables below show who does publish a figure and who doesn't.

Share of ads that show a salary, by source

We split the 4,496 open roles by where the ad came from. Startups are the roughly 150 company job boards we read directly. "Direct employers" are non-agency employers found through Reed. Agency ads are kept only when they state a salary, so that row says nothing about agencies' honesty.

Overall, 64% of the 4,496 roles show a salary. That headline is pulled up by the agency row, so the startup and direct-employer rows are the fairer picture of how employers behave. Counts by source come from the public jobs list data; the market data page shows the totals.

Startups pay more on paper, with fewer ads to go on

The ads that do show pay at startups tend to be higher. On the startup view of /insights, the median advertised salary is above the all-UK median for every role with enough data.

Treat the startup column with care. Five roles have fewer than 10 startup ads with pay: AI research (9), data engineering (7), analytics (6), cyber security (9) and tech consulting (8). One or two well-paid ads can move those medians a long way. The all-UK column also includes the startups, and a large share of it is agency and Reed listings; the gap says more about who advertises than about what a startup engineer is paid.

For single-role detail, see the salary pages for software engineers, data engineers and machine learning engineers.

Which role types hide pay most

Within startups, the share of ads with a salary runs from 11% for analytics and BI and 12% for data engineering up to 24% for tech consulting. In the all-UK view the same two data roles reach 68% and 53%, because agencies advertise them heavily with pay.

Companies that show pay, and companies that don't

Among startups with three or more open roles, a few publish a range on nearly every ad. Riverlane (15 roles) and incident.io (8 roles) show a salary on all of theirs. Others:

Others are hiring at scale and show nothing:

Some sit in between. Graphcore shows a salary on 6 of its 71 roles and OpenAI on 3 of 24. A company with only a handful of priced ads is not a reliable guide to what the rest of its roles pay. The 6 Graphcore ads have a median of £30k, which says little about its engineering pay.

What to do with an ad that has no salary

Compare it with the advertised range for the same role and seniority on the relevant salary guide, and ask for the band in the first call. Our guide to finding the salary when an ad doesn't show one has the medians by level and what to ask. Our figures come from ads, so they show what employers say in public, not what people are paid.

Figures taken on 22 October 2026 from salaryshown.com. Salaries are base pay as published in job adverts.