WIREDGOV

Key points

• In April 2014 median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees were £518, up 0.1% from £517 in 2013. This is the smallest annual growth since 1997, the first year for which ASHE data are available. Growth has been slower since the economic downturn, with the annual increase averaging around 1.4% per year between 2009 and 2014.
• Adjusted for inflation, weekly earnings decreased by 1.6% compared to 2013. The largest decrease was between 2010 and 2011, but inflation-adjusted earnings have continued to decrease every year since 2008, to levels last seen in the early 2000s.
• For the year ending 5 April 2014 median gross annual earnings for full-time employees (who had been in the same job for at least 12 months) were £27,200, an increase of 0.7% from the previous year.
• The gender pay gap has narrowed, to 9.4% compared with 10.0% in 2013. This is the lowest since records began in 1997, and despite a relatively large increase between 2012 and 2013, there is an overall downward trend, from 17.4% in 1997.
• In April 2014 the bottom 10% of full-time employees earned less than £288 per week. At the other end of the distribution, the top 10% of full-time employees earned more than £1,024. Since 1997, earnings at the 90th percentile have remained consistently at around 3.5 times earnings at the 10th percentile.
• Median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees increased by 1.0% in the public sector, and by 0.7% in the private sector. The gap has closed slightly over the long term, but private sector earnings have remained consistently at around 85% of public sector earnings since 2009.

Get all the tables for this publication in the data section of this publication.