UK Executive Salary Guide 2027

The same job title covers profoundly different jobs. A Finance Director in a £6m owner-managed business who also runs payroll and IT is not doing the job of a Group Finance Director in a private-equity-backed group with four subsidiaries and an acquisition programme. Both appear under the same heading in most salary guides. The spread between them is the guide's most honest finding.

• Check the population: which companies, which sectors, which regions, and which year.
• Check the measure: a median is not an average, and a quartile range is not a full range.
• Check the source type: official statistics, recruiter placement data, or scraped job adverts — the three routinely disagree by wide margins.
• Check what is included: base only, or base plus bonus and benefits.
• Treat the midpoint as the least informative number in any range.

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings is the UK's principal source of earnings statistics, published by the Office for National Statistics. The relevant reference points are the annual Employee earnings in the UK bulletin and ASHE Table 14, which reports earnings by occupational classification, including chief executives and senior officials, financial managers and directors, production managers and directors, and sales, marketing and related managers and directors.

• Median full-time gross weekly earnings across all UK employees were £766.60 in April 2025, up from £728 in April 2024 (ONS, Employee earnings in the UK).
• Occupational medians for executive categories are published in ASHE Table 14, broken down by region, and can be downloaded directly from the ONS dataset page.
• The ONS does not segment these occupations by company turnover or size, so the medians include very large employers and the public sector alongside SMEs.

This guide points to the ONS dataset rather than reproducing derived figures from third-party sites that reprocess it. Several widely cited executive salary numbers circulating online are third-party recalculations of ASHE data presented as official statistics; the primary dataset is linked in the sources and should be the reference point for any decision.

What moves a role within its range

• Scale and complexity: turnover, headcount, number of sites, multi-entity or group structure.
• Ownership: private-equity-backed and investor-backed businesses generally pay above owner-managed equivalents at the same turnover, with more of the package at risk.
• Sector: financial services and technology sit above the national figures in every source reviewed.
• Scope: a genuinely strategic remit with board accountability sits above a functional remit with the same title.
• Location: see the regional section below.

Research for this edition could not identify current, named, methodologically credible UK published ranges for the following roles at mid-market level: Sales Director, Head of Sales, Commercial Director, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Operations Director.

Data exists for these titles on job-advert aggregator sites, but it was internally inconsistent to a degree that makes it unusable. Two widely cited aggregators differed by roughly a factor of two on the UK average for Chief Operating Officer. One reported a regional average for Chief Revenue Officer that was materially higher than its own national average — a clear indication of a very small underlying sample.

• Chief Revenue Officer is a relatively new and inconsistently applied UK title, concentrated in technology and largely absent outside it.
• Sales Director and Commercial Director cover an unusually wide span of scope, from functional management to full commercial ownership.
• Chief Operating Officer and Operations Director vary with sector and asset intensity more than with turnover.

Where a business is budgeting one of these roles, the practical approach is to define the scope precisely, benchmark against the nearest well-evidenced role by level of accountability, and test the resulting figure against live market response rather than against a published table.

Published regional bands show London and the South East above every other UK region for executive roles, with the Midlands and the North lower. The magnitude varies considerably by role and by source.

• Robert Walters' published CEO regional bands imply a substantial gap between London and the North — roughly £150,000 to £300,000+ against £90,000 to £180,000.
• The same publisher's Managing Director bands imply a narrower London-to-Midlands gap: roughly £120,000 to £250,000+ against £95,000 to £180,000.
• ONS ASHE Table 14 publishes regional medians by occupation and is the appropriate reference for a like-for-like regional comparison.

Two practical points follow. A regional business competing for a London-based executive is competing against a different pay market, not simply a higher expectation. And remote or hybrid executive roles increasingly blur the boundary, which tends to raise regional expectations rather than lower London ones.

Every range in this guide is base salary. Reliable UK published data on executive bonus as a percentage of base in the SME and mid-market segment could not be verified for this edition, so no percentages are quoted. What can be said with confidence is structural.

• Variable pay is normal at this level, and its weighting increases with revenue accountability and with investor involvement.
• Equity and long-term incentive participation is common in private-equity-backed and venture-backed businesses and considerably less common in ordinary owner-managed SMEs.
• HMRC publishes official statistics on tax-advantaged employee share scheme usage in the UK, which is the appropriate reference point for scheme prevalence and mechanics.
• In owner-managed businesses, the harder question is usually whether equity is available at all, rather than how much — and that is a shareholder decision with tax and legal consequences requiring qualified advice.

When comparing an offer against a benchmark, compare base against base. Total-reward comparisons across businesses with different ownership structures rarely mean what they appear to mean.

The Institute of Interim Management publishes an annual UK interim management survey, which is the most established named source on the UK interim market and is referenced in the sources below. A verified day-rate benchmark broken down by executive role and company size — the thing a mid-market business budgeting an interim Finance Director actually needs — could not be confirmed for this edition, and so none is published.

• Comparing a day rate to a salary without accounting for employer costs, benefits, utilisation, recruitment cost and risk transfer produces a misleading multiple.
• Interim rates respond to urgency and scarcity far more sharply than permanent salaries do, which makes any published annual figure stale quickly.
• The practical route to a realistic interim budget is to define the assignment, its duration and the level of accountability, then test it in the market.

The structural cost comparison between permanent, interim and fractional engagement — where it comes from, and what it should include — is set out in the Permanent, Interim and Fractional Executive Guide.

1. Define the scope, authority and outcome of the role before looking at any figure. Salary follows the job, not the title.
2. Identify the closest well-evidenced benchmark by level of accountability, not by job title alone.
3. Position the business within the population honestly: scale, sector, ownership, region.
4. Decide where in the range the business intends to sit, and why. Paying at the lower quartile is a legitimate decision if the trade-off is understood.
5. Build the full package — base, variable, pension, benefits, equity if any — and be able to explain how the variable element is earned.
6. Test the position in the market early. Market response to a defined role is better evidence than any published table.
7. Review the benchmark annually against its named sources; each of the sources here publishes a new edition.