What it pays
From £28,294 for other administrative occupations n.e.c. to £75,711 for functional managers and directors n.e.c..
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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Functional managers and directors n.e.c.
£75,711Widest step £17,370 down to the next occupation.
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Business, research and administrative professionals n.e.c.
£58,341 -
Management consultants and business analysts
£53,295 -
Business and related research professionals
£41,128 -
Office managers
£38,630 -
Business associate professionals n.e.c.
£35,209 -
National government administrative occupations
£33,000 -
Local government administrative occupations
£30,886 -
Data entry administrators
£28,316 -
Other administrative occupations n.e.c.
£28,294
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
29 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
Administration is the front door and it is badly named. The work that gets people promoted out of it is noticing which parts of a process are broken and quietly fixing them, which is the job itself in miniature.
It is the most common second profession in this list: people arrive from customer service, finance and delivery roles once they have seen enough of how the place actually runs.
The qualifications are the recognised way to turn a decade of doing it into something a recruiter can read.
The regulated business administration courses, and who awards them
Who employs it
Every organisation, which makes it the most portable family here and the hardest to describe. What varies is whether operations is a function with its own leadership or a set of duties spread across other jobs.
Central and local government run this at a scale nothing else does, with the procedure and scrutiny to match, and with genuinely defined progression.
In consultancy the same skills are sold to other organisations rather than applied to your own, which is a different job wearing similar words.
What to expect
The pay range here is wider than the job titles suggest, because "operations" covers an office manager and a functional director. The distance between those two is the career.
The routine administrative half is heavily exposed to automation. The half that is judgement about people and process is not, and the gap between them is the thing to plan around.
It rewards being the person who understands how the whole thing fits together, which is knowledge you can only get by staying somewhere long enough to see a full cycle.
The professional body
CMI
The Chartered Management Institute, and an awarding body: the chartered route for managers who came up through the work rather than through a business school.