UK tech salaries up 13% in 2019

Lady sitting at a laptop
Female software developer

The average salary for a UK tech worker increased by 13% in 2019, jumping to £74,000 per annum, according to recruitment site Hired.

Software developers now earn £37,000 more than the average British worker, according to Hired's State of Software Engineers report, which looks at 2019's software engineering roles around the world and the programme languages they use.

UK developers saw a larger wage increase than any other tech hub around the world, even beating San Francisco which saw a 6% jump year-on-year.

Search engineers in the famous Bay Area still get paid the most, though, with an average wage of $157,000 (£122,000).

The three best-paid developer roles in the UK were for embedded engineers, who earn £82,000 on average, blockchain engineers, who earn £81,000 a year and computer vision engineers who also get paid around £81,000 per annum.

Global demand for Blockchain engineers has increased by 517%, according to the report, while gaming engineers saw the biggest wage increase in both London and San Francisco.

Other software developer roles that saw an increase included machine learning engineers, which ranked in the top ten highest-paid jobs for most of the hubs listed, with an average salary of £101,000.

"While salaries for software engineers continue to rise globally, the UK led the way in 2019, cementing the country's place as one of the world's top tech hubs," said Gordon Smith, European GM at Hired.

"To continue this unparalleled growth in the UK, employers, aside from offering competitive salaries, need to ensure that understanding what top talent want from their jobs is the main priority for hiring managers."

Google's Go is the world's most in-demand coding language, according to the research, but JavaScript came out on top for most use. Although TypeScript is the most popular programming language in San Francisco, Toronto and London, while Ruby was more favoured in New York and Go in Paris.

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.