UK Starting Salaries for Software Engineers

UK Starting Salaries for Software Engineers | Generated by AI

Home 2026.06

Question: What is the current UK starting salary for a software engineer — is it around £28k or £40k per year?

Let me search for current data.Answer:

Neither figure is wrong — they describe different things. The honest answer is: a typical UK graduate/entry-level starting salary sits around £30k–£35k, and £40k is roughly the London-specific or “good entry offer” number, not the national median.

Breaking it down:

National graduate median: ~£30k–£37k. Glassdoor puts the UK graduate software engineer average at £36,703 per year, with a typical pay range between £30,951 (25th percentile) and £44,205 (75th percentile). PayScale’s graduate figure is lower at £30,332 in 2026, with entry-level (<1 year) at £29,510.
£40k is the London / strong-offer number. Glassdoor’s London graduate average is £40,720 per year, 11% higher than the national average, with a typical range of £33,674 to £49,912. Indeed’s England entry-level figure is similar at £40,526 per year.
£28k is the floor — internship/placement territory or the very bottom of full-time graduate offers. Placement-year students earn £20,000–£24,000 annually, lower than full-time graduates, and PayScale notes the lowest pay for a software engineer is around £29k/year.

So:

Scenario	Typical starting salary
Regional / smaller employer	£28k–£32k
National median grad	£33k–£37k
London / banks / big tech	£40k–£50k+

For someone with your profile — 12 years shipping, model training, AI engineering — none of these “graduate” bands apply. London fintech/bank/AI roles for experienced engineers run far higher; PayScale’s early-career (1–4 yr) software engineer average is already £39,558, and the source data shows contract work delivering £90k–£150k annually at daily rates of £400–£650, with AI/fintech sitting at the top of the band.

References:

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