The highest and lowest paying jobs of 2024 revealed – where is yours on the list?

THE HIGHEST and lowest paid jobs of 2024 have been revealed with top company bosses once again taking home the biggest salaries.

The UK’s highest paid workers were chief executives and senior officials who had a median annual salary of £88,050, according to figures from the Office of National Statistics.

The data, released today, had good news for all workers with pay increases having been seen across the board in the last 12 months.

Median hourly earnings, excluding overtime, for full-time employees were £18.64 an hour in April 2024, compared to £17.52 in 2023.

Median annual earnings for full-time employees who had been in their job for at least a year were £37,430 in April 2024, compared with £35,004 the previous year.

While most workers will have seen their wages go up, the differences in pay levels between professions remain stark.

While chief executives take the top spot at £88,064, in bottom place are school crossing guards and lunchtime supervisors who earnt a medium annual salary of £19,860.

That’s a difference in annual income of £68,204 between the highest and lowest paid professions featured in the Office for National Statistics’ research.

The second best paid role was marketing, sales and advertising directors who had a median annual salary of £87,309 followed by IT directors at £86,033.

The ONS has used median figures to determine average salaries. The method lists all values in order and finds the middle value.

It prevents results being skewed by outliers, but means there will be individuals within these industries earning far more than the figures given.

The second lowest paid profession was coffee shop workers at £19,990 followed by childminders at £20,189.

The top 20 best paid professions also included pilots, medical specialists, headteachers, police officers, barristers and train drivers.

The 20 lowest paid included bar staff, waiters and waitresses, teaching assistants, hairdressers and barbers, florists and fishmongers.

Data showed that the biggest pay increases had been seen in caring, leisure and other service occupations as well as sales and customer service occupations, which both saw wages increase by 7.7% compared with the previous year.

The number of low-paid jobs fell from 9.8% of roles in April 2023 to 3.4% of roles in April 2024, the lowest percentage since 1997.

The decrease is a result of increases to the National Minimum Wage (NMW) and National Living Wage (NLW) and the extension of the NLW rate to 21- and 22-year-olds.

The percentage of high-paid employees also fell by 0.7% in the 12 month period to 22.7%.

There may be further good news for workers on the horizon with more than a million workers set to get a bumper pay rise if the NLW is increased as expected in tomorrow’s Budget.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves is due to announce major plans to boost the minimum wage by more than six per cent from April 2025.

Currently a whopping 1.6 million people are paid the National Living Wage which sits at £11.44-an-hour for workers aged over 21.

Reeves is expected to announce plans to raise this by at least 68p to £12.12, but a government source has claimed it may well be over that percentage.

Last week also saw the Real Living Wage (RLW) increase by 60p to £12.60 an hour across the UK and by 70p an hour to £13.85 in London.

The RLW is different from the government-set minimum wage and is based on the cost of living.

Employers have the right to choose whether they offer the RLW to workers and are not legally required to do so.

RLW include Nationwide, Oxfam and Ikea.

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