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On March 8, the UK government announced a pilot whereby participating employers will list salary ranges in their job adverts to tackle pay inequality. The overall picture of the UK labour market shows that, in 2021, only 62.5% of job ads contained salary information. The data comes from more than 8.6 million unique jobs analysed by Job Market Insights, which is able to extract salary information listed on all major job boards across the country.
This ratio has remained constant over the last few years (60.5% in 2020 and 63.8% in 2019). In the first quarter this year, 63.4% of unique jobs included a salary range, representing 54.5% of employers (companies and recruiters).
Education, Social & Civil Services, and Health were the job categories with the highest level of pay transparency (between 71 to 72%) in 2021. The ones with fewer adverts with salary information were Marketing & Media, Retail, Research & Science, Consultancy, and Leisure & Tourism (less than half).
Recruiters and direct employers can leverage salary information to fill positions faster and more efficiently, and at the same time adjust their salary range by predicting future trends even before they are reflected in official employment statistics.
When we take the whole market as a reference, 45.5% of all reported salaries in 2021 were in the range of £20,000 to £40,000, and 29.6% were below £20,000. Only 1.3% were above £100,000 and 1.5% between £80,000 and £100,000. Compared to the two previous years, there was no significant variation among salary bands.
When analysed by job category, IT & Telecomm was the one with the highest salaries, with 20% of positions offering more than £80,000 (10% >£100,000). Followed by Consultancy and Management jobs (17% >£80,000).
On the other side of the scale, Hospitality jobs offered the lowest wages, with 65% of the adverts listing salaries below £20,000. The rest of the job categories with below-average salaries include Retail (59%), Social & Civil Services (50%), Customer Service (50%), Leisure & Tourism (50%), and Logistics (48%). It is interesting to note that the majority of the hardest-to-fill positions in recent months fall precisely into the latter job categories.
