The UK UX careers report
What UX roles actually pay in the UK, where the jobs are, what employers ask for alongside UX, and what career-changers really move into. Every figure on this page is sourced, dated and linked. Nothing is estimated.
Last updated: · Refreshed annually
Published by UX Academy (myuxacademy.com), a trading name of Nomadic User Ltd. Free to quote or cite with attribution — see how to cite this report.
Seven key findings.
- The median advertised UK salary for jobs citing user experience is £55,000. Across 1,993 permanent job ads in the six months to 28 July 2026, with 1,366 quoting a salary. That is down 5.17% on the same period in 2025, when the median was £58,000. ITJobsWatch, User Experience
- That is about 41% above the UK median for all full-time employees. The ONS put median gross annual earnings for full-time employees who had been in their job at least a year at £39,039 in April 2025. ONS, ASHE 2025
- London pays a large premium: £70,000 against £51,250 outside London. Based on 618 London job ads and 1,199 outside London. ITJobsWatch, User Experience
- Advertised salaries fell across most UX job titles year on year. UX Designer is down 14.29% to £60,000, UI Designer down 35.31% to £51,750. Service Designer is the exception, up 27.27% to £70,000 — on a small sample of 26 quoted salaries. ITJobsWatch, job titles
- Demand for the UX Designer job title rose while pay fell. 232 permanent job ads named a UX Designer in the six months to 28 July 2026, against 137 in the same period of 2025. More postings, lower advertised pay. ITJobsWatch, UX Designer
- AI is now the 6th most common skill named alongside UX, in 20.17% of UX job ads. It appears more often than Figma (9.78%), user research (8.13%) or user-centred design (8.73%). ITJobsWatch, co-occurring skills
- Career-changers land in more places than "UX Designer". Across the 52 named graduate outcomes we publish, destinations include content design, UX writing, research, CX and strategy roles, plus analyst and engineering roles where graduates apply UX thinking. Our own alumni records, below.
What each UX title pays.
Median advertised salary in UK permanent job ads, six months to 28 July 2026, with the previous year for comparison. Sample sizes are shown because several of these titles are advertised in low volume — treat the smaller samples with caution.
| Job title | Median salary | Change year on year | Job ads | Salaries quoted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Service Designer | £70,000 | +27.27% | 45 | 26 |
| UX Designer | £60,000 | -14.29% | 232 | 164 |
| Product Designer | £60,000 | -27.27% | 91 | 51 |
| User Researcher | £55,000 | No change | 147 | 86 |
| Interaction Designer | £53,171 | -18.20% | 81 | 65 |
| UI Designer | £51,750 | -35.31% | 91 | 62 |
Source: ITJobsWatch, UK permanent job vacancies, six months to 28 July 2026. Each job title links to the source page. Read on 28 July 2026.
The full salary spread
Medians hide the range. Across the 1,366 UK job ads citing user experience that quoted a salary, the distribution runs from £31,250 at the 10th percentile to £92,500 at the 90th.
- 10th percentile£31,250
- 25th percentile£40,000
- Median (50th)£55,000
- 75th percentile£74,688
- 90th percentile£92,500
Source: ITJobsWatch, User Experience, UK permanent job ads, six months to 28 July 2026. Bars are drawn to scale against the 90th percentile.
London, and everywhere else.
A UX role advertised in London carries a median of £70,000. Outside London the median is £51,250 — a gap of £18,750. Remote and work-from-home ads sit between the two at £55,000, on 750 postings, which is a meaningful share of the 1,993 UX job ads in the period.
| Location | Median salary | Change year on year | Job ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | £70,000 | -1.54% | 618 |
| Scotland | £60,000 | +2.13% | 58 |
| Work from home | £55,000 | -8.33% | 750 |
| South West | £53,750 | No change | 133 |
| Yorkshire | £53,000 | +11.58% | 121 |
| UK excluding London | £51,250 | -4.54% | 1,199 |
| North West | £51,000 | -7.27% | 229 |
| South East | £50,000 | -4.76% | 207 |
| Wales | £48,961 | -27.47% | 44 |
| West Midlands | £47,500 | -13.64% | 100 |
| East Midlands | £45,000 | +20.00% | 74 |
Source: ITJobsWatch, User Experience, top job locations, read on 28 July 2026. Locations with fewer than 40 job ads in the period are excluded here because the medians are unstable at that sample size; Northern Ireland, for example, had only 6.
The skills advertised alongside UX.
This is the most useful table on the page for anyone planning what to learn. It counts how often each skill appears in the same UK job ad as user experience. The headline: process and collaboration skills dominate, AI has moved ahead of the tool skills, and the specific software named on a CV matters less than most course marketing suggests.
| Skill | Rank | Job ads | Share of UX job ads |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agile | 1 | 560 | 28.10% |
| UX Design | 2 | 527 | 26.44% |
| Continuous Improvement | 3 | 476 | 23.88% |
| Problem-Solving | 5 | 434 | 21.78% |
| AI | 6 | 402 | 20.17% |
| Analytics | 8 | 362 | 18.16% |
| Roadmaps | 9 | 330 | 16.56% |
| Accessibility | 10 | 322 | 16.16% |
| Stakeholder Management | 15 | 204 | 10.24% |
| Figma | 18 | 195 | 9.78% |
| User-Centered Design (UCD) | 21 | 174 | 8.73% |
| User Research | 24 | 162 | 8.13% |
Source: ITJobsWatch, User Experience co-occurring skills, read on 28 July 2026. This is a selection from the published top 30; ranks are as given at source, so the numbering has gaps where we have omitted an entry. Share is the proportion of the 1,993 permanent UK job ads citing user experience in the period.
Where career-changers actually go.
Public salary data tells you what roles pay. It does not tell you what a career-changer realistically moves into. This section is our own record: 60 named individuals who completed a UX Academy course, and the 50 named organisations they moved into. It is published here because nobody else has it.
This is not a placement rate, and we do not publish one.
The figures below describe the composition of the graduate outcomes we publish. They are not a success rate, an employment rate, or a percentage of students who got a job. We do not have a verified denominator for every person who has ever taken a course, so any such figure would be unverifiable, and we removed an unsourced placement claim from this site in June 2026 for that reason. UX Academy makes no job guarantee anywhere.
Named before-and-after transitions
| Graduate | Role before | Role after | Organisation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sam | Market Research & Product Development Specialist | Product Designer (UX/UI) | Bluepass |
| Vitor | Product Manager | UX Strategist | Independent consultant |
| Vita | Marketing Designer | UX Designer | Airbnb |
| Chrysanthi | Customer Service Coordinator & Trainer | UX Writer | Not stated |
| Sabrina | UX/UI Designer | Senior UX Designer | IBM |
| Gaby | Events Assistant | Content Designer | Not stated |
| Claire | Senior UX Designer | Head of UX | Not stated |
Source: UX Academy alumni records. Graduates whose prior role is recorded only as "career changer" are omitted from this table because the prior role is not specific enough to be useful. Surnames are withheld at the graduates’ request.
What the 52 published outcomes look like
| Role family | Published outcomes |
|---|---|
| Design and UX | 36 |
| Research | 3 |
| Content | 3 |
| Other roles applying UX | 10 |
Source: UX Academy alumni records. Counts, not rates — see the note above. Classification rule, applied in this order: a job title counts as Research if it contains "research"; otherwise Content if it contains "content" or "writer"; otherwise Design and UX if it contains UX, user experience, experience design, interaction, UI or design; otherwise Other. The rule is published so it can be checked. Of the 39 outcome records carrying a location, 30 are in the UK or London; the remainder are in Europe, North America and beyond.
The 50 organisations our graduates moved into
Adobe, Aiimi, Airbnb, Apple, Babylon Health, Barclays, BBH London, Becave, Bluepass, Canva, Cazoo, Citi, CloudCall, Codex Global, EDP Renewables, Emperor, Everis, EY, FutureLearn, Geely, Google, GSK, Hey Mirza, IBM, Idean, IMD Business School, Juice Plus+, Kinto Join, Knight Frank, Legal & General, Mezzo Labs, Microsoft, Mitel, MUUH Group, Open Destinations, Ordr, Pinnacle Group, Prostate Cancer UK, Proton, Shakespeare Martineau, Spindox, Sport Buff, Spotify, TD Bank, Track24, UserTesting, Vonder, WeWork, Wunderman Thompson Commerce, Zone
Source: UX Academy alumni records and course testimonials. Named organisations only; independent and freelance outcomes are excluded from this list. The spread runs across banking and insurance (Barclays, Citi, Legal & General, TD Bank), health and pharma (GSK, Babylon Health, Prostate Cancer UK), consumer technology (Airbnb, Spotify, Google, Apple, Adobe, Canva, Microsoft), agencies and consultancies (BBH London, Wunderman Thompson Commerce, Zone, Idean, EY), and education (FutureLearn, IMD Business School). Full named outcomes are on our graduate results page.
Sources, limits and how to check us.
Sources
- ITJobsWatch — User Experience: salary percentiles, job-ad volumes, regional medians and co-occurring skills. UK permanent vacancies, six months to 28 July 2026. Read 28 July 2026.
- ITJobsWatch job-title pages for UX Designer, Product Designer, Service Designer, User Researcher, Interaction Designer and UI Designer. Read 28 July 2026.
- Office for National Statistics, Employee earnings in the UK: 2025 (Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings), released 23 October 2025. Used only as the comparison baseline: median gross annual earnings for full-time employees who had been in their jobs for at least a year. 2025 estimates are provisional.
- UX Academy alumni records, held by Nomadic User Ltd, for every figure in the primary-data section.
What these numbers are not
- Advertised, not earned. ITJobsWatch measures salaries quoted in job adverts. Actual pay, bonuses and equity are not captured, and many employers advertise no salary at all — 1,993 UX job ads produced only 1,366 quoted salaries.
- IT job channels. ITJobsWatch indexes IT and technology vacancies. UX roles advertised through design, agency or in-house channels outside that index are not counted, so volumes are a floor rather than a total.
- The ONS comparison is indicative. The ONS figure is April 2025 earned pay for full-time employees with at least a year in the job; the UX figure is advertised pay in the six months to July 2026. Different periods, different measures. It is a sense of scale, not a precise premium.
- Small samples move medians. Where a job title or region has fewer than about 50 quoted salaries, a year-on-year swing of 20% or more can come from a handful of postings. We publish sample sizes so you can judge.
- Our alumni data is a published subset, not a census. It describes the outcomes we hold and are permitted to name. It is not a placement rate.
How to cite this report
Journalists, researchers, course reviewers and anyone writing about UK design hiring are welcome to quote these figures. Please attribute and link back, and cite the original source for any figure we have sourced from ITJobsWatch or the ONS. Suggested citation:
UX Academy (Nomadic User Ltd), "UK UX Careers Report", updated 28 July 2026. https://myuxacademy.com/uk-ux-careers-report/
Found an error, or have UK UX hiring data we should include in the next edition? Tell us and we will correct or credit it. This report is refreshed annually; the next update is due July 2027.
Using this to plan a career change?
UX Academy runs live online UX courses for UK career-changers. No job guarantee, published pricing, named instructors. The named outcomes behind the primary data above are on the results page.