Software developer salary in the United Kingdom
The median pay for this job in the United Kingdom is £56,914 a year. Half of workers earn between £42,289 and £75,794.
ONS ASHE, 2025 provisional: SOC 2020 2134 Programmers and software development professionals, about 343,000 full-time jobs.
Pay today
| Where in the range | Pay a year |
|---|---|
| 10th percentile | £32,835 |
| 25th percentile | £42,289 |
| Median | £56,914 |
| 75th percentile | £75,794 |
| 90th percentile | £102,860 |
Gross annual pay for full-time employees who have been in the same job for more than a year.
Pay at 30, 40 and 50
This is the app's forecast for one example: someone aged 25 with 3 years of work experience, anywhere in the UK. ONS does not publish pay by age and education together, so education does not move this curve. A different age, experience or region changes the numbers.
| Age | Median, with likely range |
|---|---|
| 30 | £45,000 £34,000 to £61,000 |
| 40 | £59,000 £43,000 to £78,000 |
| 50 | £64,000 £47,000 to £85,000 |
On this path pay is highest around age 50, with a median of £64,000.
The range is the 25th to 75th percentile, rounded to the nearest thousand, in today's money. It follows the age curve for full-time pay by age (ONS ASHE). How it is worked out is on the home page.
Your own numbers. Salary Predictor for iPhone works this out for your age, job, education, experience and region, shows the age your pay tends to peak and where you stand against people your age.
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The same job elsewhere: United States, Canada.
Sources
- Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14 (occupation). Office for National Statistics, 2025 provisional.
- Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 3 (region). Office for National Statistics, 2025 provisional.
- Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 6 (age group). Office for National Statistics, 2025 provisional.
- Graduate labour market statistics, 2024. Department for Education, 2024.
- Schooling, Experience, and Earnings. Jacob Mincer, National Bureau of Economic Research / Columbia University Press, 1974.
- Earnings Functions, Rates of Return and Treatment Effects: The Mincer Equation and Beyond. Heckman, Lochner & Todd, Handbook of the Economics of Education, vol. 1, 2006.
- The 'Mincer Equation' Thirty Years After Schooling, Experience, and Earnings. Thomas Lemieux, in Jacob Mincer: A Pioneer of Modern Labor Economics (Springer), 2006.
- The Lognormal Distribution, with Special Reference to its Uses in Economics. J. Aitchison & J. A. C. Brown, Cambridge University Press, 1957.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.