Every year, I faithfully publish a salary survey which reviews the salaries and market conditions of the creative sector. I look at the various recruitment and market trends - a bit of a 'what's hot and what's not'. Over the last 20 odd years, the salaries have not really varied significantly - I mean, we've always known that this isn't one of the higher paying sectors like say law, accountancy, medicine, finance or dentistry, however what most of us get is satisfaction from working in a creative industry and most of us wouldn't truly have wanted to work in those other sectors!
Where I have seen a significant shift is in salaries at the junior end of the scale. For new graduates coming into the sector, most salaries are £25k - and that's regardless of whether you are in client services, design, events, PR, planning, digital or project management. In the old days, this would be more like £16-18k - and that's even just as far back as 2019. The key driver for this is in the fact that the minimum wage in the UK is now pretty much £25k - so agency bosses have had to step up and pay the going rate - even if many of the old school brigade will still talk about back when they started on £15k....
However, I do think that agencies are taking on less juniors. Or maybe they are just hiring less overall - which is generally true. What with the rises to NI contributions too, the overhead in just hiring one extra member of staff is significant. Plus....clients are spending less and wanting more for their money - everything has become far more stretched than it used to. Some agencies have shifted to models where they simply don't have juniors. Rather they have senior and midweight staff who 'do everything'. This is more frequently seen in client services teams where an AD may well be tasked with writing strategy but also logging costs into systems and writing minutes from meetings.
Interestingly, I have observed that senior salaries have not shifted in line with juniors being paid more. We're seeing quite a definite salary ceiling which has resulted in many Account Directors commenting that they've been pretty much on the same salary for over 10 years. I do think that once the £50k mark is achieved salary wise, the number of roles available for more money and the more elevated job titles - we're seeing far less of them than ever before. Of course, in 2025, we saw a lot of redundancies and these were particularly harsh for senior level agency staff. We do see jobs for between £50k and £60k but really after £60k there is a large drop off.
It's frustrating, not least because I can predict that we will lose people from the sector. Those juniors starting out at £25k may well find that they can progress readily speedily up to the £40k mark but they will then find things stalling - probably just at the point when they are hoping to secure a mortgage or start a family.
In 2025, we saw lots of cuts in the regional network agency offices. It was in these agencies that some of the higher salaries were achievable - i.e. beyond £75k. We now have some very experienced individuals who are finding it impossible to match or even come close to what they were earning.
I can't truly predict how this will go. At the moment, I'm simply hoping that 2026 is a busier year for all of us and that businesses become less uncertain about hiring. However, there are global economic, political and social factors all at play here, plus the additional joy of AI and seeing how that will affect hiring strategies. Agencies in the creative sector will continue to evolve and transform - it will be interesting to see if salaries evolve and transform too!
By Fiona, 9th February 2026