The average advertised salary in the UK has crossed £40,000 for the first time, according to the latest data from Adzuna.
The company’s UK Job Market Report found that average salaries rose in December 2024 to £40,623, up just over 1.5% on the previous month and the highest on record.
Salaries in December 2024 were up 7.2% compared to December 2023, Adzuna found, driven by demand for highly skilled staff and employer hesitancy around hiring.
However, job seekers faced a difficult recruitment landscape in December, with job vacancies falling by 4.0% to 844,152. This was after a brief jump in vacancies in November but also represented the smallest annual decrease since November 2023.
Job seekers per vacancy reached 2.05, up from 1.96 in November. The average duration of job postings increased from 32.8 days to 34.1 days.
Legal firms took the shortest time to fill jobs at 31.1 days, followed by admin (31.6) and property (31.9).
Domestic help and cleaning jobs took the longest to fill at 38.7 days, followed by energy, oil and gas (38.5) and healthcare and nursing (37).
The number of employers not sharing salaries in job postings continued to decline, with 53.71% hiding salary details in December. Adzuna found that 2024 was the worst year on record for salary transparency, with only one month in the year (February) where there were more jobs with salary information than without.
In terms of vacancy growth, trade and construction and teaching posted increases in vacancies of 6.6% and 4.3% respectively.
These increases were offset by slight falls in professional services, however, such as accounting and finance (down 2.3%), consultancy (down 2.2%), and legal (down 3.4%).
After rising in November, retail jobs dropped in December, down by almost a fifth. Hospitality jobs also fell sharply, by 12.7%.
Year-on-year, teaching had the largest increase of 25.7% compared to December 2023.
However, the majority of sectors experienced an annual drop in vacancies, with retail down 41.4%, PR, advertising and marketing down 38.4%, energy, oil and gas down 36.9% and graduate jobs down 24.4%.
Average annual salaries went up in most sectors compared to November, according to Adzuna, with only administration roles experiencing a drop of just 0.1%.
On an annual basis, the only sector to see a drop in average salaries was legal, down 3.5% compared to December 2023.
Advertised salaries continued to climb in the regions with Northern Ireland experiencing the most annual growth at 13.8%, followed by the West Midlands and north-east England.
London and south-east England continued to be at the bottom end of the table, and south-west England overtook London, up 5.7%, in December.
Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, said: “Jobseekers who were hoping for a continued streak of growth in available roles following November’s bounce will be disappointed, as vacancies fell again in December.
“While it appears companies are not hiring as much, they are loosening their purse strings, with the average advertised salary now reaching over £40,000 for the first time since we started tracking the UK job market in 2016.”
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