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How Much Do Sales Professionals in the UK Earn?

Median Salary Reports

Aggregating data from the major job salary sources including Glassdoor, Hays, Payscale and the ONS we have provided a calculated median of sales salaries using over 100,000 sales professionals reported salaries in the UK:

Median Basic Sales Salary 2019: £29,455

Sources: ONS, Glassdoor, Hays & Payscale

Median Sales Salaries by Job Title

The same aggregated data source of Glassdoor, Hays, Payscale and the ONS has been used to show the median job salary of UK sales professionals:

Median Sales Salaries by Region

Looking at the major economic hubs in the UK, we have calculated the variance of sales salaries for each city compared to the national UK median:
Regional Sales Salaries vs National Median (%)

Median Sales Salaries by Region – Job Titles

Below are the absolute figures of how much you can expect to earn in a sales role for each locality measured:

About the data sources:

Office of National Statistics (ONS): Breaking down job titles by SOC job title codes, we have reviewed national salary data from 2011 using ASHE reports, which uses 1% of earners on PAYE tax, in absolute terms around 300,000 UK earners.

Hays – a global specialist recruitment group, who produce a large amount of salary data based upon the vacancies they advertise. For our study, we reviewed all salaries in the job title definitions, reported between 01/02/2019 and 28/02/2019.

Payscale – an international salary reporter, Payscale provide the largest real-time salary survey in the world with more than 150,000 new survey records added every month. For our study, we used reported job title salaries as of 28/02/2018.

Glassdoor – over 855,000 company salaries are reported on by employees across the world through Glassdoor, an independent company information site. For our study, we used reported job title salaries as of 28/02/2018.

About the data analysis:

The information is provided choosing Median Data. The median is the value below which 50% of jobs fall. It is ONS’s preferred measure of average earnings as it is less affected by a relatively small number of very high earners and the skewed distribution of earnings.

It therefore, gives a better indication of typical pay than the mean.

Our main median average salary metric aggregates all sources providing a non-biased view of true salaries by job title and region.

Bonus & Basic Annual Salary

For the above study, we focussed on total annual basic salary, not including any incentive pay like a yearly bonus. You may be interested in our recent study reviewing 2018 incentive pay ONS data which breaks down bonus pay by occupation and region.

For example, the average London bonus in 2018 was nearly £7,000, which would tip gross annual income of the median sales director in the capital to around £95,000:

Other regional salary analysis:

View our job title salary analysis for key locations in the UK including:

We welcome use of our data in other studies or articles. Please reference Aaron Wallis Sales Recruitment and www.aaronwallis.co.uk as the author of the study.

Published: 1st April 2019

Rob Scott, Aaron Wallis Sales Recruitment, Author Photo

About the author

Rob Scott

Rob is the Managing Director of Aaron Wallis Sales Recruitment, a national recruitment agency specialising in sourcing sales and marketing staff for businesses across a broad range of commercial sectors. Before setting up Aaron Wallis, Rob spent ten years at a specialist Sales and Marketing recruitment division of a £0.5BN recruitment group, leaving in 2007 as Marketing & Sales Director to establish Aaron Wallis.
 
With over 26 years of experience in sales recruitment, Rob is a History graduate with an MBA (Merit) and a PgCert in Management Practice.  In 2007, 2009 and 2013, Rob conducted the most extensive surveys of sales professionals in the UK and is a trusted authority in the sales industry. From guiding employers through the recruitment process to helping candidates find their dream job, Rob's advice has been quoted in leading publications such as the FT, Business Insider, Forbes and The Independent, as well as OnRec, which hosts The Online Recruitment Awards every year.