ASHE, HMRC and HBAI figures for the UK
The earnings rank here comes from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, a 1% sample of PAYE records. Its unit is the job: someone with two part-time posts appears twice, and only full-time jobs on adult rates held for more than a year count towards the annual figures. In the 2026 provisional release the median full-time job paid £40,911 a year, and the top 10% started at £82,680. ONS revises the provisional figures in the following year's release.
Where the job is done moves every line. London's full-time median is £53,132 and its top 10% start at £131,515. The median is £41,466 in Scotland, £38,203 in Northern Ireland and £37,330 in Wales. Picking a nation re-ranks your salary on that nation's own table from the same survey.
ASHE stops at the 90th percentile. For the top of the range HMRC's Survey of Personal Incomes is the better guide, though it counts taxpayers and all their taxable income, rents and dividends included. In 2023 to 2024 the top 10% of taxpayers started at £67,400 before tax and the top 1% at £207,000. After tax the same cut-offs fall to £54,300 and £134,000. The additional rate and the withdrawn personal allowance compress the top far more than the bottom, and HMRC ranks the after-tax figures separately, so a person's place can differ between the two lists.
The household view uses DWP's Households Below Average Income, drawn from the Family Resources Survey. The United Kingdom has no statutory poverty line. DWP's headline measure is "relative low income": household income before housing costs below 60% of the median, which for a single adult in the year to March 2025 was £289 a week. DWP sets its scale so that a couple without children counts as 1, with the first adult weighted 0.67, a partner 0.33 and each child under 14 0.2. This page restates every figure for a single adult, the form in which DWP itself publishes its annual percentiles: a single person's median household income was £25,100 and the top 10% began at £47,400. For a couple with two children under 14 the median was £52,500.
DWP publishes no high-income threshold, so the line at twice the median is this page's own and is labelled as derived. Nation medians in HBAI are averages of the three survey years to March 2025, which steadies the smaller samples behind the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish estimates.
A £50,000 salary sits above the full-time median of £40,911 and well short of the £82,680 at which the top 10% of full-time jobs start. Against all taxpayers it ranks higher, because HMRC's list includes part-time workers and pensioners: the taxpayer median was £29,700 before tax. On the household lens the comparison uses take-home pay, which for a single adult on this salary lands between DWP's single-adult median of £25,100 and the £47,400 at which the top 10% begin.