In the year 2007-08:
£ 29,500 you’d be just in the top 25%
£ 44,900 you’d be just in the top 10%
£ 61,500 you’d be just in the top 5%
£ 149,000 you’d be in the top 1%.
These above figures are from http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/income_distribution/3-1table-jan2010.pdf
- this is “Table 3.1″ from http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/stats/income_distribution/menu-by-year.htm
From a BBC article on Just what is a big salary?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8151355.stm
This is all looking at 2008 figures. Which I presume are 2008-2009, as they are slightly higher than those above.
The Office for National Statistics’ Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) provides some of the most reliable figures.
According to ASHE, “mean” gross annual earnings across all employee jobs in 2008 came to £26,020. You may think that’s rather a high “average” salary. And if you look just at the figures for full-time employees, that figure rises to £31,323.
Another way of measuring it is “median” gross annual earnings. According to ASHE, this was the more modest figure of £20,801, across all employee jobs. If you are earning that sum a year, you are “Mr or Mrs [or Ms] Mid-Point” – precisely half the surveyed working population earns less than you and half more. For just full-time employees, the median rises to £25,123.How about if you make the top 10%? The ASHE figures reveal that a salary of £44,881 is enough to just edge into that top bracket.
A gross annual salary of £58,917 gets you into the top 5%.
But the standard that has cropped up in newsprint over the years is “the top 1%“. It takes £118,027 to get into this bracket. And if you are earning £150,000 – the amount that triggers 50% income tax – you are in the top 0.6% of salaried people, according to the ASHE.
Interestingly, there is a point about where the data comes from:
So does that mean that if you earn £45k that you are in the country’s top 10% of earners? Sadly it’s not as simple as that. The ASHE is a sample of 1% of people who pay tax via PAYE. It doesn’t include the self-employed – businessmen, contractors etc – who make up the ranks of the really wealthy.”
- so you need to look at these figures in that context.
- but I suspect it won’t push median figures by much and mean figures but not much more.