UK Tech Salaries 2026: What the ONS Data Shows (and Why It Differs from Recruiter Guides)

If you searched for UK tech salaries 2026, the first page of results was almost certainly written by a recruiter. Harvey Nash, Robert Half, and Hays each publish a glossy annual salary guide; between them, they own the SERP for the head term. The numbers they quote are not wrong, but they are not the whole picture — and they are not the right anchor if you are negotiating an offer, planning a move, or working out whether your team is paying market rate.

The Office for National Statistics publishes the same job titles, the same year, from a much larger, randomised sample. The numbers it shows are systematically lower. For a software engineer the gap can run to five figures. For a data scientist it can be wider still.

This guide puts the two side by side, explains why the gap exists, and gives you honest 2026 ranges for six common UK tech roles. Every salary figure comes from our role × region salary pages, which in turn derive from the latest ASHE release. Where ONS suppresses a cell because the sample is too small to publish safely, we say so — we never invent a number to fill it.

Quick answer: Recruiter salary guides typically report UK tech salaries 5–27% above the ONS median for roles concentrated in London and recruiter-mediated hiring — DevOps (+27%), product management (+15%), cybersecurity (+14%), and data science (+9%) show the largest gaps. For mid-level software engineers, the gap is near zero. For benchmarking what a typical worker actually earns, anchor on the ONS figure; for top-of-market negotiation, the recruiter range is a useful ceiling check.

The recruiter-report problem

Recruitment firms publish salary guides for one straightforward reason: it generates inbound business. The reports are real, surveyed data — but the incentive shapes the result in two ways.

First, the sample is self-selected. The respondents are people who use recruiters: candidates actively interviewing, hiring managers actively recruiting, freelancers between contracts. That cohort skews toward higher earners. Settled engineers who have been at the same employer for five years on a quiet, undermarketed salary do not fill in the survey.

Second, the role definitions are narrower. A recruiter's "senior software engineer" implicitly means someone they would place at a recruiter-friendly employer: London or Manchester, three-plus years of experience, hybrid or remote-first, often product or consultancy. ASHE's equivalent code captures every employed software developer in the UK, including embedded developers at industrial firms, in-house IT in local government, and developers at small regional employers.

The consequence is that recruiter figures are systematically biased upward versus the population of employed tech workers as a whole, and the gap is largest for the roles most concentrated in London and most over-served by recruitment firms.

ONS ASHE figures for tech occupations

ONS classifies tech jobs under the Standard Occupational Classification 2020. The relevant codes — usually grouped as SOC 213x — cover:

SOC 2020 code	Title	What it covers
2133	IT business analysts, architects and systems designers	Analysts, architects, and systems designers — scoping, designing, and governing solutions
2134	Programmers and software development professionals	Software, mobile, backend, frontend, and embedded developers — the bulk of coding roles
2135	Cyber security professionals	Security analysts, engineers, penetration testers, and architects
2136	IT quality and testing professionals	QA engineers, test analysts, and automation testers
2137	IT network professionals	Network engineers and systems administrators managing IT infrastructure
2139	Information technology professionals n.e.c.	Catch-all: includes data, ML, SRE, DevOps, and other specialisms not separately coded

UK median full-time gross annual pay across the UK in 2026 (ASHE 2025 Provisional):

SOC code	Title	UK median	London median	London premium
2133	IT business analysts, architects and systems designers	£59,593	£74,780	+25%
2134	Programmers and software development professionals	£55,587	£77,845	+40%
2135	Cyber security professionals	£54,816	£59,374	+8%
2136	IT quality and testing professionals	£44,973	£39,840	−11%
2137	IT network professionals	£48,294	£55,455	+15%
2139	Information technology professionals n.e.c.	£50,459	£61,217	+21%

Side by side: ONS vs Harvey Nash / Robert Half for six roles

Role	ONS ASHE 2025 Provisional (UK median)	Recruiter guide (latest)	Gap
Software engineer (mid-level)	£55,587	£54,250 (Robert Half 2026)	−2%
Senior software engineer	£75,077 (ONS p75, SOC 2134)	£79,060 (Harvey Nash 2026)	—
Data scientist	£59,593	£65,250 (Robert Half 2026)	+9%
DevOps engineer	£55,587	£70,750 (Robert Half 2026)	+27%
Cybersecurity analyst	£54,816	£62,500 (Hays 2026)	+14%
Product manager (tech)	£58,016	£66,750 (Robert Half 2026)	+15%

The general pattern: the recruiter figure sits above the ONS figure — by anywhere from a few percent to five figures at the senior end. The software engineer row is the notable exception: Robert Half's published UK figure tracks at or slightly below the ONS median. The gap is widest in the roles most concentrated in London and most likely to be filled via a recruitment process.

Why the gap exists

1. Sector mix — recruiter samples over-represent financial services, consultancies, and product-tech firms. ASHE captures every PAYE-employed tech worker, including lower-paid roles in local government, NHS digital teams, and embedded development at smaller industrial firms.
2. "Total compensation" muddying — some recruiter guides quote total compensation (base + bonus + equity) without always labelling it that way. ASHE measures gross cash pay. For roles where equity is meaningful, the recruiter "salary" figure can sit 20–40% above the ASHE-comparable number.
3. Survey timing and freshness — ASHE 2025 Provisional captures pay as at April 2025; recruiter guides are usually compiled the prior autumn. UK tech has cooled meaningfully since 2023, and some guides still show elevated figures inherited from the 2022 peak.

Honest 2026 ranges for six UK tech roles

Software engineer

UK median £55,587 · London median £77,845 (+40%) · UK p90 £101,172. See our software developer salary in London and UK software developer salary pages for the full distribution.

Data scientist

UK median £59,593 (from SOC 2133) · London median £74,780 · UK p90 £99,939. The recruiter range for this role is one of the most inflated in the cluster.

ML engineer

Classified inside SOC 2134. UK median £55,587 · London median £77,845 · UK p90 £101,172. The supply-demand gap remains the widest of any tech sub-discipline.

DevOps engineer

Sits inside SOC 2134. UK median £55,587 · London median £77,845 · UK p90 £101,172. The gap between mid-level DevOps and senior SRE is one of the steepest in the dataset.

Cybersecurity analyst

SOC 2135 (Cyber security professionals). UK median £54,816 · London premium +8% (much smaller than software engineering's +40%) · UK p75 £73,083. In-house government, defence, and financial-services hiring distributes the high end across multiple regions.

Product manager

Read from SOC 2131. UK median £58,016 · London median £53,826 (−7% — one of the few roles where London median sits below UK median in ASHE) · UK p75 £74,520.

London vs rest-of-UK adjustment factor

The London premium for tech is unusually large. For most UK occupations the London-vs-rest gap is 10–15%. For software developers (SOC 2134) it is +40% and for IT architects and analysts (SOC 2133) around +25%.

Three reasons: (1) London concentrates the highest-paid tech employers — investment banks, hedge funds, US tech firms, late-stage scale-ups. (2) Employers price in a London weighting of £5,000–£10,000 for technical hires. (3) Since 2022, more London-headquartered employers pay the same band UK-wide for remote-eligible roles, narrowing the gap from below.

How to read any recruiter salary guide critically

• Check the sample — how many respondents? How were they recruited?
• Check the unit — median or mean? Base salary or total compensation?
• Check the geography — "UK" in a recruiter guide often means London and the South East
• Check the experience band — "senior" means different things to different employers
• Check the date — some recruiter guides republish prior-year ranges with minimal updates
• Anchor on ONS, range with recruiter — ONS median as anchor, ONS p90 as realistic ceiling, recruiter top-of-range as stretch ceiling for top-of-market employers

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Sources: ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 (provisional), SOC 2020 occupational tables. Harvey Nash Group Digital Leadership Report 2025. Robert Half 2025 UK Salary Guide, technology section. Hays Cyber Security Salary Guide & Recruiting Trends 2025.