Average national IT salary breaks £40,000 mark

The national average permanent salary of an IT professional has crept up to over £40,000 a year, a two percent rise over the last three years and the highest average wage ever recorded for the industry.

A wage analysis, from recruitment firm CV Screen, looked at fifty different IT roles placed in the national press and on all of the UK’s leading job boards in the first three months of 2016, and compared them to the same period three years earlier.

Unsurprisingly, those working in London earn the most with the average salary in the capital fourteen percent above the national average.

In second and third place are the South East and Thames Valley, where average earnings are at eight percent and five percent above the national average respectively.

Completing the top five regions on pay are East Anglia, one percent above the national average and the Midlands, two percent below the national average.

The lowest-paying region is Wales, where average IT salaries are thirteen percent below the national average. This ties in with data from numerous salary studies that show Welsh workers are the lowest paid in the UK.

Second from last is the South West, where average IT salaries are eleven percent below the national average, followed by the North West at ten percent below, the North East at eight percent below and Scotland at four percent below.

The research also found that those IT professionals with web development and software engineering experience are most in demand.

Matthew Iveson, managing director at CV Screen, said: “London and the South East are consistently ranked among the best places to work in Britain, and Thames Valley has been described as the UK’s Silicon Valley, so it is no surprise that IT professionals earn more than the national average in these regions.”

@AntonySavvas