Wages have not kept pace with the rising cost of living for many British workers, leading to a wave of strikes in recent months.
Figures suggest that the picture is much worse in some occupations than others, with teachers and nurses suffering more wage losses from inflation than workers in other sectors.
BBC News analyzed pay figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the last 10 years to see how wages in different occupations compare to the overall average and to find out how far train drivers, paramedics, civil servants and others are paid. has kept up with the prices.
Over the past decade, the wage of an average UK full-time worker has increased by around a quarter to £33,000 in April 2022. That’s almost in line with rising prices and just £230 less than equivalent inflation.
This interactive chart allows you to view average salaries across a range of sectors.
The average salary for secondary school teachers has fallen by almost £4,500 behind rising prices over the last 10 years: one of the biggest falls of any career studied.
The average secondary school teacher earns more than the average total worker: just under £41,000 last April. But had that salary kept pace with rising prices over that period, that figure would have risen to over £45,000.
The ONS does not compile data for every type of teacher. But the picture for “teachers” as a whole, which includes elementary schools and college teachers, looks very similar to that in secondary schools. They have an average wage of around £41,000, but that’s almost £5,000 short of price increases since 2012.
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According to a separate analysis by the Nuffield Trust, the average salary for a resident in England in the year to March 2022 was just over £55,000.
Junior and senior doctor salaries are combined in the ONS data, so the BBC cannot analyze them in the same way as other careers.
Senior doctors are not on strike and are in the top 2% of earners in the UK.
Junior doctors earn well above the average salary in England, but the Nuffield Trust estimates their salary has lagged inflation by almost £5,000 since 2011.
This is a smaller drop than the headline used by the BMA, but still larger than many other groups of workers, based on ONS data.
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The wages of the lowest civil servants, or what the ONS calls “government jobs”, have kept pace with rising prices, but they are not wealthy.
This includes people who might work as counselors in a job center or as administrators in central government. The average full-time salary for this type of job is around £27,700.
That’s nearly £1,300 more than if inflation alone had increased wages over the past decade. However, it is still well below the national average.
The Union for Public and Commercial Services (PCS) says it has prioritized wages for the least affluent in negotiations with public sector bosses.
On the next rung are “associated professionals” at an intermediate level. Their average salary is about £2,400 more than the national average, but if it had kept pace with prices since 2012 it would be almost £900 higher.
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Also represented in the data are other workers who have been willing or have gone on strike in recent months, such as physiotherapists, ambulance workers, nurses and railway workers. Some are currently in wage negotiations with their employers.
NHS staff in England other than doctors have been offered a new pay deal, which unions are recommending to members. Firefighters who had threatened to go on strike recently accepted a new collective agreement.
Overall, the average nurse’s salary is a few thousand pounds above the national average, but their pay has not kept pace with rising prices.
The average salary for a full-time paramedic is almost 50% higher than the average wage for a blue-collar worker and has outpaced prices by around £3,000 over the last 10 years. Unions say some of that growth can be attributed to the NHS pay scales in 2016, which saw paramedics move up a notch to reflect changes in their jobs.
Meanwhile, ambulance drivers and paramedics have been hardest hit by inflation. They were earning £27,500 as of 2022, which was almost £1,600 less than if their wages had risen with inflation.
While train drivers do well, not all train workers do. Train travel assistants, a category that includes ticket inspectors and station attendants, saw their average wage fall by £300 compared to inflation in the latest figures.
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Salary data used in this analysis comes from the latest ONS Annual Hours and Earnings Survey (ASHE).
We took the gross wage for the average full-time worker in each occupation – using the median average – and compared the growth of that wage to inflation, as measured by the annual CPIH.
The Nuffield Trust figures were based on NHS England figures and used a different measure of inflation called the CPI, which has been growing slightly faster than the CPIH.
When job names or codes changed from one year to the next, we used this search tool developed by Warwick University to match jobs.
The coronavirus pandemic affected poll numbers for 2020 and 2021 due to various factors including the holiday. The ONS suggests treating these numbers with more caution.
Salary is the salary of the average worker and is not an accurate measure of working conditions, salary ranges or starting salaries. It includes overtime, bonuses or allowances for non-social hours and applies to employees in the public or private sector. Elevations can be caused by things other than elevations. These include a shift in seniority (lower-paid workers are retiring) or working hours (more people are working overtime).
Median wage growth likely underestimates wage growth for an individual worker who is promoted and moves from below average to above average within their job.
In the table at the top of the story, we refer to “lower level” and “middle level” officials. The ASHE descriptions for these posts are National Government Administrative Jobs (Junior) and Associated Public Service Professionals (Mid).
Additional reporting from Becky Dale, Libby Rogers, Zoe Conway and Robert Cuffe
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