Salary Intelligence
Software Developer
A professional who designs, builds, tests and maintains software applications or systems.
An Office for National Statistics estimate. This figure is the ONS's own published estimate, reused under the Open Government Licence, not a figure WageOra has worked out itself. See Salaries for how WageOra checks and uses figures like this one.
Median gross annual earnings
£56,914.00 per year — median gross annual earnings for full-time employee jobs, United Kingdom.
Provenance
| Source | Office for National Statistics — Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), 2025 (provisional, corrected 19 December 2025) |
|---|---|
| Table | ASHE Table 14 |
| Occupation code (SOC 2020) | 2134 — Programmers and software development professionals |
| Geography | United Kingdom |
| Reference period | Tax year ending 5 April 2025 |
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3.0 |
What a software developer does
Software developers design, build, test and maintain the programs and systems that people and businesses rely on. The title covers a lot of ground. Someone building the screens you see in a mobile app, someone writing the code that moves money between banks, and someone working on software inside a car engine can all hold this job title and share almost nothing in their working day.
There's no licence or required qualification for the work. Some developers come through a computing degree, some through an apprenticeship, and plenty are largely self taught. That mix is part of why pay under one title varies as much as it does.
What the ONS figure covers
It's drawn from employee jobs, so it leaves out anyone working through their own limited company or on a contract basis. That's a common arrangement in this line of work, and contract day rates behave quite differently from salaries, so the figure won't tell you much if that's the route you're weighing up.
The survey does collect bonuses, commission and profit sharing, which ONS groups together as incentive pay. Worth keeping in mind if your own package leans on them, because they move year to year in a way a basic salary doesn't.
What can affect a software developer's pay?
Seniority does most of the work. Most employers run bands, and moving up one usually matters more than moving between companies at the same level.
After that it comes down to the sector, whether your employer is a software business or a company that happens to need software, how specialised your area is, and where the job is based. Roles carrying responsibility for keeping systems running, or for their security, tend to pay above general development work.
What this could mean for take-home pay
Using the 2026/27 tax year and the median above as a gross salary (England, Wales & Northern Ireland, no pension or student loan), our calculator works out a take-home pay of £43,567.52 per year (£3,630.63 per month). This is a worked example, not a claim about what you'd actually take home — try your own numbers on the Salary Calculator.