What it pays
From £26,851 for human resources administrative occupations to £57,529 for human resource managers and directors.
Median gross annual pay, full-time employees. Each figure belongs to the occupation beside it. There is no average across a profession, because none is measured.
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Human resource managers and directors
£57,529 -
Human resources and industrial relations officers
£35,194 -
Human resources administrative occupations
£26,851
Bars are drawn to scale from zero.
ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional), from the April 2025 survey. Open Government Licence v3.0.
The jobs it covers
10 occupations sit in this profession, on the government’s own classification. Each one is a page: what the work involves, what you decide, and how you are measured.
How you get into it
Most people arrive sideways rather than by training for it. Administration, recruitment or an office role that quietly absorbed the people work is the common route, and the qualification usually comes after the job rather than before it.
The Level 3 and Level 5 qualifications are the recognised ladder, and they are written for people already doing some of the work: you evidence them against real cases rather than sitting an exam about invented ones.
There is no licence to practise. Nobody can stop you doing HR without a qualification, which is why the qualification is worth having when a role is contested.
Who employs it
Every organisation above a certain size has this function, which is what makes it portable. The work moves between sectors far more easily than most.
In a small organisation it is one person doing all of it, usually alongside something else. In a large one it splits into reward, resourcing, employee relations and development, and people specialise early.
Public sector, NHS trusts and large charities run substantial HR functions with their own progression, and the policy work there is heavier than in most private firms.
What to expect
The step that changes the job is from administering decisions to making them. It usually arrives with employee relations work, and it is the point at which the reading and the judgement start to matter more than the process.
Specialising early pays and narrows. Reward and employee relations tend to carry the most, generalist roles the most options.
The work is unusually exposed to being the person who delivers bad news. Most people who leave say that, rather than the pay, is what decided it.
The professional body
CIPD
The professional body for HR in the UK, and an awarding body: its qualifications are the ones most employers name in a job advert.