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henry.careers

Original research

Where the £100,000 jobs are

Across 1,898 UK roles at £100,000 a year or more, or £500 a day or more — and a regional pattern that is not the one people expect.

London has most of them. That part is not surprising. What is surprising is that the roles which publish a salary pay almost exactly the same wherever they are — and the ones where London pays a premium are the ones that will not tell you the number.

The map

Region Roles Employers State pay
London 863 114 25.7%
North of England 302 95 92.7%
South East and East 288 69 95.8%
South West 167 36 83.2%
Midlands 153 42 99.3%
Remote or UK-wide 75 17 1.3%
Wales 37 10 100.0%
Scotland 12 4 25.0%
Northern Ireland 1 1 100.0%

London is where the private sector advertises

82% of every private-sector role on this board is in London — 681 of 829. Outside London and remote work, the private sector barely appears at all: the Midlands has 153 senior roles on this board and not one of them comes from a company's own careers site.

Which means the regional disclosure column above is not really about regions. It is about who is advertising. Where a region's listings are NHS listings, pay is published; where they are private, it is not. The disclosure gap is the same story told a different way.

The published salaries are the same everywhere

This is the part worth knowing. Of the 5 regions with enough listings to compare, 5 share an identical most common advertised figure: £113,565. Not a similar figure — the same one, in London and in the North of England alike.

That is the NHS consultant pay scale, which is set nationally. It is why a board built on adverts that state pay shows almost no regional variation: the employers who publish a number are the ones whose number is fixed by policy rather than by market.

So the London premium that everyone assumes exists is not visible in this data — not because it is absent, but because it lives in the private-sector roles that decline to state a salary. We cannot show you what we cannot see, and neither can anyone else working from advertised pay.

What this is not

It is not a map of where senior work exists in the UK. It is a map of where we can see senior work advertised, and the two differ in ways worth stating plainly.

The private-sector half comes from employers' own applicant-tracking boards, found by testing candidate company names — which finds technology and venture-backed firms, headquartered overwhelmingly in London, and almost no law firms, insurers or accountancy practices anywhere.

The public-sector half is NHS Jobs, which covers England and Wales. NHS Scotland and Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland run their own recruitment systems, which we do not ingest. That is why Scotland shows 12 roles here and Northern Ireland none — a gap in our sources, not in those economies.

Read it as a measurement of senior UK roles reachable on public job boards and employer career sites. Re-measured each time the board rebuilds.

By city, month by month

The regional table above is the whole board as it stands now. These are dated snapshots of individual cities — what was advertised that month, and what the highest-paid roles stating a salary actually paid. They are kept as a record rather than refreshed, so roles that have since closed are marked and not linked.

Browse by region

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