What Is the Top 1% Salary in the UK?

What Salary Puts You in the UK's Top 1%?

To sit in the UK's top 1% of income earners, HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC) latest Survey of Personal Incomes, covering the tax year 2023 to 2024, puts the threshold at £207,000 a year in total income before tax. The median full-time salary, for comparison, was £39,039 in April 2025, according to the Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. The top 1% threshold is up from £201,000 the year before and from £159,000 a decade earlier. HMRC counted 36.7 million income tax payers in 2023 to 2024, according to its Income Tax liabilities statistics, though it publishes the top 1%'s share of income and tax rather than a headcount of the group itself.

£207,000 isn't purely a salary threshold. This figure is a measure of all taxable income received from every source, including dividends, rent, business profits, and more, not salary alone. For those whose income comes entirely from a salary, the comparable figure is narrower: the ONS' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025 puts the 99th percentile of gross annual pay for full-time employees at £186,840, lower than the £207,000 total-income threshold, because income at the very top increasingly draws on dividends and other non-salary sources. In addition, this figure only includes taxpayers and excludes those earning less than the £12,570 personal allowance. Because the 1% is measured against taxpayers rather than all adults, the threshold is higher than it would be if the whole adult population, including non-earners and those below the personal allowance, were counted.

Fiscal drag also shapes these figures. Income tax thresholds, including the £12,570 personal allowance, have been frozen since 2021 while nominal wages have kept rising, so each year more people are pulled into higher tax bands without any real gain in income. This doesn't move anyone up the percentile ranking, because percentiles are relative. What it does change is the group the top 1% is measured against: frozen thresholds bring more people into income tax, so the taxpayer pool keeps growing. The £207,000 cash threshold also rises with nominal incomes, not necessarily with any real gains at the top.

What About the Top 5% and Top 10%?

The top 1% is only the sharpest end of the distribution. HMRC's percentile points for total income before tax show how quickly the threshold falls as you move down the ranks. In the 2023 to 2024 tax year, an income of £93,600 was enough to place you among the top 5% of earners in the UK, while the top 10% started at £67,400.

Source: HMRC, Percentile points from 1 to 99 for total income before and after tax, Survey of Personal Incomes, tax year 2023 to 2024. Figures cover UK income tax payers only and include all taxable income, not salary alone.

Who Are the UK's Top 1% of Earners?

The most detailed study of this group came from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). Its briefing note The characteristics and incomes of the top 1%, published in August 2019, drew on HMRC tax records from 2000/01 to 2015/16. The picture it painted was more concentrated than "high earner" suggests: the top 1% was disproportionately male and middle-aged and clustered in London and the South East, with the share living in London rising from 29% in 2000/01 to 35% in 2014/15.

The gap this created was stark. The IFS put the national top 1% threshold at a taxable income of £162,000 in 2014/15 — a slightly different basis from HMRC's total-income series, which is why it sits a little above the £159,000 figure above. Yet a man aged 45–54 in London on that income needed, in the IFS' words, "a further £550,000 to be in the top 1% for his gender, age and region". On £162,000 he would not have made the top 5% of that peer group either, where the cut-off was £195,805.

The same research found that how people earned mattered as much as where they lived. Partners in business partnerships were heavily over-represented at the top: 7% of all partners were in the top 1%, and 58% of all partnership income accrued to that group. Of those in the top 1% who got most of their income from partnerships, 85% were based in financial and professional services. Company owner-managers were also significant, with many keeping profits inside their companies rather than taking them as a salary or dividends. The IFS has not repeated the study since, so these findings describe the position up to 2015/16 rather than today.

Do People Stay in the Top 1%?

Membership of the top 1% was far from permanent. The IFS found that around a quarter of those in the top 1% in one year had left it by the next, and only about half were still there five years later; only 30% were in the group in all five years. As a result, many more people passed through the top 1% at some point than were in it in any single year: 3.4% of people born in 1963, and 5.5% of men born that year, were in the top 1% at some point between 2000/01 and 2015/16.

UK Top 1% Income vs Top 1% Wealth

One common confusion is treating the "top 1% by income" and the "top 1% by wealth" as the same group. They are not. The £207,000 income threshold measures the annual income of an individual, while the ONS' Wealth and Assets Survey measures the net worth of a household, so the two are not directly comparable. On that measure, the wealthiest 1% of households in Great Britain held wealth of at least £3,121,500, according to the ONS bulletin Household total wealth in Great Britain. That figure comes from Round 8 of the survey, covering April 2020 to March 2022, and the ONS has suspended the survey's accredited status from Round 8 onwards while it works on data quality, so it is best read as an indication of scale rather than a current threshold.

Someone can rank highly in one measure without ranking highly in the other; a high-earning young professional with no savings may sit in the income top 1% while owning almost no wealth, while an asset-rich retiree with a modest pension may sit in the wealth top 1% on a relatively low income. This matters for debates about equity and inequality because it means income taxes and wealth taxes fall on substantially different groups: raising income tax rates hits high earners, many of them mid-career professionals, while a tax on assets would land more heavily on older, asset-rich households, some of whom have relatively modest incomes.

Why the UK's Top 1% Salary Concentration Matters

According to HMRC's Income Tax liabilities statistics, the top 1% of income tax payers received 12.4% of total income in 2023 to 2024 but were liable for 27.2% of all income tax, a share HMRC projects will ease to 26.6% by 2026 to 2027. That imbalance sits at the heart of the UK's income gap between the highest and lowest earners, a gap most clearly illustrated by the Lorenz curve — and it is what makes the group so significant for the public finances, since a small shift in the earnings or tax behaviour of a few hundred thousand people moves total income tax receipts noticeably.