Which are the highest and lowest paying jobs in 2020?
To get a snapshot of the job market six months into the pandemic, Emolument surveyed 20,000 senior employees (10+ years’ experience) working in London to try and identify the highest and lowest paid positions.
Results show that all five highest paid jobs are in finance, with M&A advisers earning the most. They also show that employees in industries directly affected by the pandemic are among the lowest paid ones.
5 highest paying jobs
| Job | Median Salary | Median Bonus | Total |
| M&A (Banking) | £ 186,500 | £ 163,500 | £ 350,000 |
| Prime Brokerage Sales (Banking) | £ 191,500 | £ 153,500 | £ 345,000 |
| Origination & Syndication (Banking) | £ 196,000 | £ 117,500 | £ 313,500 |
| Structuring (Banking) | £ 194,000 | £ 116,000 | £ 310,000 |
| Institutional Sales (Banking) | £ 195,000 | £ 114,000 | £ 309,000 |
Banking is still king: Despite years of cost-cutting and redundancies, financial services are still no match for other industries when it comes to compensation. All 5 best paying jobs in our rankings are related to investment banking, with the highest paid ones being senior M&A advisers, with an eye-watering total compensation of £350,000 per year.
Up or out: While salaries and bonuses for senior bank employees are much higher than in any other industry, the odds of a graduate employee ever reaching that level of compensation are slim: only 20% of an analyst class will make it to MD level. The remaining 80% will have left banking before being promoted to managing director, been pushed out, or stuck in lower paid positions.
5 lowest paying jobs
| Job | Median Salary | Median Bonus | Total |
| Event Marketing | £ 51,000 | – | £ 51,000 |
| Procurement & Purchasing | £ 48,500 | £ 1,500 | £ 50,500 |
| Executive Assistant | £ 43,000 | £ 6,000 | £ 49,000 |
| Charity Fundraiser | £ 39,000 | – | £ 39,000 |
| Retail – Shop Floor | £ 28,000 | – | £ 28,000 |
Experience doesn’t always pay: At £28,000, and despite having an extensive industry experience of more than 10 years, retail employees in our sample remain below the median UK salary (£30,000), hinting at the industry’s precarious health.
The future is bleak… Two of the five lowest paid jobs in our rankings are in industries that are likely to remain deeply affected by Covid-19 in the next few months: retail shopping and event organising. While at the moment senior event marketing employees are still faring much better than retail workers (£51,000 vs. £28,000), they might see their compensation crumble as large scale events are being discarded in most countries for the foreseeable future.
Thomas Drewry, co-founder of Emolument said: “More than a job, it’s an industry’s business model that is under pressure: the retail industry accounts for 10% of the UK’s economy, way above financial services’ 6.9%, but it seems its viability can only be sustained at the cost of salaries much lower than in any other industry. It is yet to be seen what will happen to this fragile equilibrium, at a time when Covid-19 is accelerating the shift towards online businesses and digital workers.”
