What it pays
From £35,128 for IT user support technicians to £91,671 for information technology 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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Information technology directors
£91,671Widest step £31,383 down to the next occupation.
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IT business analysts, architects and systems designers
£60,288 -
IT project managers
£58,373 -
Programmers and software development professionals
£56,914 -
IT managers
£56,438 -
Cyber security professionals
£54,647 -
Information technology professionals n.e.c.
£54,107 -
IT network professionals
£48,907 -
Web design professionals
£48,629 -
IT quality and testing professionals
£47,118 -
Data analysts
£38,572 -
Database administrators and web content technicians
£37,995 -
IT operations technicians
£35,259 -
IT user support technicians
£35,128
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
31 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
Support is the front door and it is not a lesser one. IT user support and operations are where most people in this family started, and the ones who move fastest are usually the ones who kept fixing things nobody asked them to fix.
It is the least credential-bound family here. Nobody checks for a degree at the door, which cuts both ways: it is easy to get in and harder to prove you should be promoted.
Data analysis is the route in that has opened most recently, and it takes people from finance, operations and marketing rather than from computing.
Who employs it
Every organisation employs this now, which means the choice is less about sector than about whether you want to build the product or keep the place running. They are different jobs that share a job title.
In a software company technology is the business, and the work is judged on what ships. Everywhere else it is a function, and the work is judged on whether anything broke.
Public sector, healthcare and financial services carry the heaviest constraints: security, regulation, legacy systems. They pay for people who can work inside them.
What to expect
The widest pay range of the three, and the widest gap between the entry rungs and the top. Specialising is what moves you, and cyber security and architecture are where that shows most sharply.
The two directions out of a technical role are management and depth, and they are genuinely different careers. Most people are pushed towards management by default rather than choosing it.
What the tools do changes faster here than anywhere else in this list, which makes the durable part the judgement rather than the syntax. That is the argument for Future Fluency in a family that already knows it.
The professional body
BCS
The Chartered Institute for IT: the closest thing this family has to a professional register.