What is happening to starting salaries in this country?!

[user8636283901]

My starting salary in 2009 - so mid-GFC - was £30,000.

That was 16 years ago! And in one of the worlds worst global recessions since the Great Depression of the '30s.

I was casually looking at starting salaries in similar fields to mine and it seems like they're barely moved, all the while the cost of living is miles ahead of where it was 16 years ago.

Why are wages so low in this country?! Why haven't they moved up?!

Yup, great advice - I emigrated from the UK last year and almost doubled my salary. Although at 35 I’m not that young! I think the advice should actually be extended to everybody, any age: if you want to accumulate any kind of wealth independently, you should leave the UK.

You see so many posts on mn saying how much time ai is saving them in their jobs but they don’t understand their roles will soon not to be needed by being so reliant on it.

Time got a universal basic income.

I’m thinking of leaving would you mind sharing where you moved to? @Crushed23

I agree @doodahdayy generative AI is very problematic to society in general and I know it’s harmful to those of us in the creative industries.

My boss suggested I use this generative AI tool to help me come up with a summary headline for a blog and I flat out said no. People are using it so uncritically and not thinking of the long term effects or impact or the ethics.

We have a very robust recruitment process as well, it’s accountancy (not big firm) and we traditionally taken on a mixture of a level students and graduates to work towards professional qualifications, but we also have some staff who aren’t taken on to work towards professional qualification so doing book keeping etc, it’s these roles that he’s saying we may as well take on graduates. There are so many graduates now that people with degrees don’t always have the option of what would have been considered a graduate job 30 years ago when I graduated. Graduates are having to go into the roles that would have been done by a school leaver

@Crushed23 @Exitin yes you are absolutely right. I'm trying to enter the local job market here in Switzerland after being at SAHM for 4 years and I'm interviewing for junior roles that pay almost double my salary that I earned at senior level in London. And will only pay 20% tax.

Who will pay? Fewer workers means fewer taxpayers. Taxes would have to rise enormously to pay for it, meaning few people would bother working at all. It's a nice idea in theory, but completely impractical. The reality is that people will have to accept a lower standard of living. Even if UBI was introduced, it would be at a low level, then probably 50-60% tax on all your earnings if you did work, so people would be no better off.

I’ll add that to my ‘might relocate there’ list!

I did remember a Swiss woman on my masters course years ago telling me how she earned working in retail back there and being shocked at how much it was although I can’t remember the hourly rate now.

Not surprisingly she went back to Switzerland immediately after graduation.

Was that for a months salary?

Convincing grads to stay at a bookkeeping role must be challenging, it's so badly paid. It's fine for first job but staff turnover must be quite high?

It’s scandalous OP, I earn not much above NMW and we haven’t had a whiff of a pay rise in more than 4 years

If they built 2 bedroomed detached houses I would downsize. They are all either flats, terraces or semis and I have misophonia.

Simple, 14 years of the previous Government. Top-end salaries have risen hugely but at the lower end .....

alot of people go to university now, not all are high flyers and end up in a traditional “graduate role”. We have graduates working in bk, payroll and on reception. Minimum wage for a 35 hour week is £22k so no one is on less than that.

Stagnant wages predate the last government. But they had 14 years to fix it and got nowhere, you’re right. The thing is, the situation doesn’t look like it’s going to get better anytime soon, so I’m not sure we can pin any hopes on the change in government…

They really haven’t risen at the top end either. I was a company director at a large regional company in the UK on £100k plus bonus, so about £110k total whereas a previous role overseas which was similar in most respects was $300k plus bonus, so about $500k total. I’d still rather be in the UK, because money can’t buy what we have here (children are physically safe in school, general law and order, etc). However, there has been a massive change in the ability of women to work in executive roles, for example I hired a nanny on NMW and I got no tax breaks for that, so my own take home salary barely covered the cost of childcare so I could work (and the nanny didn’t feel wealthy because so much tax was deducted from NI, pension, income tax, etc so what she received was far less than what it cost me to hire her). In my case, I needed a nanny due to a driving requirement, and with multiple children, a childminder was also expensive (we tried it and it was too chaotic for my kids).

So there really isn’t the salary difference at the more senior end, compared with other “developed” countries.

I agree. 👍

There is still this myth that graduates earn significantly more than non- grads. I'm sure it was true when 3-4% of school leavers went to uni but when 50-60% go to uni, the sums just don't work out. Someone still has to do the lower paid jobs.

AI is still very unreliable, and anyone using it for serious purposes should be very careful.

Stupid journalist uses AI to write his article. Stupid newspapers print this article without realising it is an AI hallucination. Readers are possibly wondering why the books they are now trying to buy do not in fact exist...

www.npr.org/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405022/fake-summer-reading-list-ai

@DuesToTheDirt Even worse, scammers have realised it’s easy to churn out “books” using AI and self-publish them on Amazon, so scam made-up books are already there to be bought by people who took the reading list seriously.

Apparently there’s also a problem with published authors seeing fake AI versions of their books for sale with just a letter or two changed in the title or author, hoping to get people to buy them before they realise they’ve been scammed.

£30k in 2009 would have been high! I was in the media so notoriously low salaries but in 2009 I was on £19k as a features editor and the overall editor of an 11 edition newspaper was £30k. My starting salary as a graduate was 11k (bloody newspapers).

I now work in nhs communications and starting graduate would be a band 5 (same as a newly qualified nurse).

In 2009 i was on 30k about 5 years into my career and thought I'd made it! Similar roles in my field today would be paying around 40k. So up a bit but no where near enough to match the cost of living increase.

@TeenLifeMum Ah, I started as a sub-editor for £19k in 2008! When I went freelance in 2013 I brought in c. £32k annually and felt rich beyond my wildest dreams. Very few freelance subbing shifts now of course but when I started, we paid a freelance day rate of £130 (magazines not newspapers), which hadn’t changed in a decade from what I was told. Last shift I was offered in 2020 before subbing imploded, rate was… £130. One digital site even now offers £117, fucking lol.

@pelargoniums taking redundancy from newspapers in 2009 was the best thing I could have done. They wanted me to relocate so I’d have an how and a half commute and pay for parking all for £21k… no thank you (dd was 18 months old). In Covid they made the journalists travel to the city saying they were “essential” and couldn’t work from home - they definitely could. This is why journalism is poor - pay badly and treats people like shite.