UK Graduate Starting Salary 2026

The detail

There are two "graduate starting salary" numbers people mean, and they differ by around £6,500. The broad figure comes from HESA's Graduate Outcomes survey, which asks UK graduates about their activity 15 months after they finish. For the 2022/23 cohort, the median salary of first-degree graduates in full-time paid UK employment was £28,500 - up from £27,500 for the previous year's cohort.

The higher figure comes from High Fliers' The Graduate Market in 2026 report, which surveys only the UK's 100 best-known graduate employers (the large banks, law firms, consultancies, tech and consumer-goods brands that run structured graduate schemes). Their median starting salary is £35,000. Most graduates do not join one of these 100 firms, so the HESA £28,500 is the more representative "typical graduate" figure.

Subject and sector drive most of the variation, and High Fliers analyses its top-employer salaries across fifteen industries and business sectors - so the £35,000 median masks a wide spread between sectors.

High Fliers also reports that graduate recruitment at top employers has been cut by almost a quarter in three years - down 6.4% in 2023, 14.6% in 2024 and 5.1% in 2025, or 24.5% since 2022 - with a further 0.5% decrease expected in 2026. High Fliers says that is a larger fall than in the pandemic or the 2008-09 recession, so competition for the highest-paying graduate roles is intense.

A £28,500 starting salary is below the UK full-time median of £39,039 (ONS ASHE 2025), which is expected - pay rises steeply through a worker's 20s. To see the monthly take-home on a graduate salary after Income Tax, National Insurance and Plan 2 or Plan 5 student loan repayments, use our salary calculator.