Would you consider 25k a year a low income for a single person?

[Geraldinefox]

Outside of London.
It's not even 25, it's 24.8k.

This is for a single person living alone.

depends on the job and your qualifications.

On MN it's very low, nearly every post I see people claim to be earning six figures

To be honest. Yes. I'd assume that's a starting/early careers salary. My DS is a new entrant to the workforce. His outside of London contract is £27k.

Yes, very low.

I think it would be hard to live on in the SE unless it was in a houseshare.

It's the civil service AO salary isn't it? It never was that well paid by standards but the pension was the plus point.

If I'm wrong sorry, it's been a long time.

Until recently our family of four lived on £25k and it was tight, but manageable. We did it for four years. We even had a couple of holidays and ran two cars. No benefits as we had too much in savings (which we very rarely dipped into). The mortgage on our 3-bed semi is only £500 a month though.

@LoneHydrangea you aren't paying your 'admin team' a living wage!

It's not that much more than minimum wage so yes it's quite low if you're working full time.

It's objectively a low salary - it's only just above minimum wage.

Yes. It’s less than I earn and I consider myself a low earner.

several people have said this but I don't get the relevance

If you're old enough to be on state pension you have had 40-50 years to build up some savings, and ideally pay off a mortgage, an opportunity a 20/30 year old will not have had.
If you have no other income than state pension you will usually be entitled to various other benefits as well as the pension.
You won't have many of the necessary expenditures often associated with working.
You won't be paying tax or NI if the state pension is your only income.
You won't have to consider how you might afford future dependants on that income.

It's not comparing like for like.

It's less than median income. So yes it is lower than average

That's about 6k lower than the average.
So yes, I'd say it's on the lower end, not far off minimum wage as PP pointed out.

But it's still Vastly more than some in this country have to exist on which is terrible really.
Carers allowance and unemployment for example.

Good and so it should be. If someone is claiming state pension then they have the opportunity to plan for their retirement for a number of years.