A new map has revealed the UK’s best – and worst – paid places.
Last year the median annual full-time wage rose by 5.8 percent to £34,963, while the median weekly salary increased by 6.2 percent to £681.
But wages are much higher in some parts of the country than others.
Median annual pay is higher in Scotland (£35,518) than it is in England (£35,106), Northern Ireland (£32,879) or Wales (£32,371).
Among English regions, there is a distinct North-South divide with workers in London earning the highest annual pay packet (£44,370), followed by the South East (£34,963), and East of England (£34,833).
The lowest wages are in the North East (£31,200), followed by the East Midlands (£31,634), and then Yorkshire and the Humber (£31,920).
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data comes from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, based on a 1 percent sample of full-time jobs taken from HM Revenue and Customs’ Pay As You Earn (PAYE) records.
It illustrates huge differences between the wages of people living in the UK’s best and least-paid council areas.
Discounting the City of London banking district – which is only home to a small number of people who mainly work in highly paid jobs within the finance industry – workers living in the London borough of Tower Hamlets earn the most money.
The median annual pay in Tower Hamlets is £61,984 and the median weekly pay £1,120.
However, many people living and working in London receive a higher wage due to the increased costs of living in the capital.
Outside London, workers living in affluent Three Rivers in Hertfordshire earned the highest annual median wage of £46,232, followed by residents of the remote Shetland Islands to the north of Scotland (£44,052), and then Ribble Valley in Lancashire (£41,874) – which is by far the highest paid council area in the North of England.
At the end of the spectrum workers in Oadby and Wigston, Leicestershire take home a median wage of just £24,337 annually or £470 per week, the lowest in the UK.
Next is Burnley in Lancashire (£28,173 annually) and then Merthyr Tydfil in Wales (£27,852) and Torbay in Devon (£27,116).
The ONS data shows the median and mean salaries of full-time workers who live in each part of the country.
The ONS believes median pay – the amount which 50% of jobs fall below – is a more accurate measure of average earnings than taking the mean amount, which can be skewed by a small number of very high-paid jobs.
You can check the median wage where you live and see how it compares to the rest of the country using our interactive map.
