Average Londoner earns £20,000 or 68% more money a year than workers in Lancashire town
A new study from a leading thinktank has revealed that the average annual wage in London is 68% - the equivalent of almost £20,000 - higher than in the East Lancashire town of Burnley.
Drawing attention to the growing issue of increasing UK regional inequality, Centre for Cities’ 2025 Cities Outlook report has revealed that average workers in London, Reading, and Slough earn in eight months what the average worker in Burnley earns in a whole year.
This effectively means that the average employee in London earning £49,455 could stop working in August, have a four-month unpaid holiday, and still earn the same amount of money as a full-time, 12-month worker in Burnley on the town’s average salary of £29,508.
Described as being an ‘annual health check of the economic performance of urban Britain’, the report represents a deep-dive into economic data to not only reveal wages across the country but also assess how cities and towns perform based on metrics including innovation, housing, skills, employment, and productivity.
It also revealed that the regional discrepancy in wages could largely be attributed to some places boasting more ‘cutting-edge’ private sector jobs - the places with higher average pay such as London or Cambridge featured twice as many cutting-edge firms and three times as many jobs in prominent employment areas such as biotech and artificial intelligence.
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