Pay Is Rising, Hiring Is Cooling: What Employers Are Advertising in London, Manchester and Edinburgh (June 2026)

The UK jobs market in mid-2026 is sending two signals at once. Pay is still climbing — yet the volume of work on offer is shrinking. For anyone job-hunting right now, that combination shapes both what you can ask for and how hard you'll have to fight to get it.

According to the ONS Labour market overview, UK: May 2026, regular pay grew 3.4% year-on-year and total pay (including bonuses) rose 4.1%, while job vacancies fell to 705,000 — the lowest level since 2021 — and the unemployment rate sat at 5.0%. The squeeze is sharpest for younger workers: youth unemployment has reached 14.7%, roughly one in seven young people looking for work.

So pay packets are rising while doors are closing. Against that backdrop, we looked at what employers are actually putting in their adverts — for three UK cities, not the UK as a whole.

What employers are advertising

The figures below come from live ResuMinder job postings as of June 2026 — specifically the roughly one in four adverts that disclose a salary (more on that caveat in the methodology). Each figure is the midpoint of the advertised range, filtered to a plausible £10,000–£250,000 band. They cover three UK cities with enough disclosed-pay adverts to analyse — London, Manchester and Edinburgh — and are not a read on the national market.

Median advertised salary by city:

• London — £46,922 (n=4,490), middle band £38,432 to £53,579
• Edinburgh — £44,943 (n=405)
• Manchester — £38,800 (n=833), middle band £23,400 to £49,875

The first surprise: London and Edinburgh are closer than the clichés suggest — under £2,000 apart at the median. London's advertised lead over Manchester is wider, around £8,100, but even that is narrower than the gulf people often assume separates the capital from the regions.

A word on Edinburgh's shape. Its median and 75th percentile land on the same figure (£44,943), with a lower 25th percentile of £37,258 — so the top half of its disclosed adverts cluster tightly while the bottom quartile sits a meaningful £7,685 below. Read its median as a central tendency with a clustered upper half, not as a smoothly spread market. Manchester, by contrast, has the widest spread of the three: a low 25th percentile (£23,400) pulling against a 75th near £50,000, a sign of a barbell mix of lower-paid and well-paid roles among the ads that name a figure.

London by role

London has enough disclosed-pay adverts to break down by job type with some confidence. Where the sample is solid (n≥20):

• Data analyst — £52,620 (n=27)
• Project manager — £48,786 (n=52)
• Data scientist — £48,772 (n=26)
• Nurse — £47,660 (n=124)

Nursing stands out for sheer volume — 124 disclosed adverts, by far the deepest single-role sample in our London data, reflecting open NHS and private banding. Data analyst tops this group on median advertised pay, and notably advertises slightly above data scientist in the current sample — a reminder that job titles are not a reliable salary ladder.

A few higher-paying roles show up too, but on small samples we flag as indicative only (fewer than 20 adverts each — read these as a hint, not a benchmark):

• Software engineer — ~£63,000 (n=13, indicative)
• Security engineer — ~£55,600 (n=8, indicative)
• Marketing manager — ~£51,480 (n=9, indicative)
• Finance analyst — ~£49,046 (n=10, indicative)

The software-engineer figure is eye-catching, but with just 13 disclosed adverts it could move sharply next month — an early signal rather than a reliable London rate.

Beyond London

Nursing gives us the one role we can compare across all three cities:

• London nurse — £47,660 (n=124)
• Manchester nurse — £41,175 (n=26)
• Edinburgh nurse — ~£39,975 (n=8, indicative)

Same role, materially different advertised pay depending on where you apply. The London-to-Manchester step of roughly £6,500 tracks the broader cost-of-living gradient. Edinburgh's nurse figure rests on just eight adverts, so it's indicative only — directionally lower than London, but not a number to bank on.

The national gap — read it carefully

Here is the comparison everyone reaches for, and the one that needs the most care. London's median advertised salary of £46,922 sits roughly £7,900 above the ONS national median earned full-time salary of £39,039, drawn from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) for April 2025 (up 4.3% on the year). On paper, Edinburgh's advertised median runs about 15% above that benchmark too.

That looks like a clean "city premium". It mostly isn't a like-for-like number, and we won't pretend otherwise:

• Advertised is not earned. Our figure is what employers post; the ONS figure is what people across the country actually take home. Advertised ranges skew towards the optimistic top of what a role might pay.
• City versus nation. We're putting individual cities against a UK-wide median that includes every region and sector.
• Disclosed-pay only. We see only the adverts that name a salary. Roles that hide pay — often the highest and the lowest — are invisible to us.

Treat the gap as illustrative of direction, not a precise premium. The safest comparison is city-to-city within our own dataset, where the methodology is consistent. The honest takeaway: the salaries employers are willing to advertise openly in London and Edinburgh sit comfortably north of the national earned median — useful context when you're judging whether an offer is competitive.

What this means if you're job-hunting

With vacancies at their lowest since 2021, employers hold more of the cards on volume — but rising pay and openly advertised salaries give you leverage on price. Three practical reads:

• Role beats average. A London data analyst and a London nurse advertise within a few thousand pounds of each other, so anchor your expectations to your specific role, not a city-wide headline.
• Location is a lever. The same nursing role advertises around £47.7k in London versus roughly £41.2k in Manchester. Where you apply matters as much as what you apply for.
• Use disclosed-pay adverts as anchors. With fewer vacancies and many ads still hiding pay, the disclosed comparables above are among the few concrete numbers you can take into a negotiation. A tempting advertised range is the top of that negotiation, not a guarantee.

Methodology

• Source. ResuMinder live, active job postings (excluding crawl-excluded bulk feeds), drawn from a point-in-time internal snapshot. Advertised salary is the midpoint of the advertised range, filtered to a plausible £10,000–£250,000 annual band. We report the 25th, 50th (median) and 75th percentiles where they add context. City figures cover London, Manchester and Edinburgh only.
• As of. June 2026 (data snapshot 8 June 2026).
• Disclosed-pay caveat. Only about 25% of live adverts disclose pay — in the full catalogue, 61,104 of 241,650 active postings. That catalogue is international (its largest employers and locations are outside the UK), so the 25% rate is a property of the whole dataset, not a measured UK disclosure rate; the city figures above are filtered to the named UK cities. Roles that hide salary are excluded, which can bias the picture at both the top and bottom of the market.
• Sample sizes. City medians rest on solid samples: London (n=4,490), Manchester (n=833) and Edinburgh (n=405). Solid role-level samples include London nurse (n=124), project manager (n=52), data analyst (n=27), data scientist (n=26) and Manchester nurse (n=26). Any figure marked indicative (London software engineer, security engineer, marketing manager, finance analyst; Edinburgh nurse) rests on a small disclosed-pay sample (n<20), can swing month to month, and should not be read as a benchmark. The ResuMinder figures here are point-in-time internal queries and are not reproducible from our public endpoints, which expose broader, unfiltered counts.
• Advertised is not earned. Every ResuMinder figure here is advertised pay. The ONS national median of ~£39,039 is earned full-time pay across all employees nationwide (ONS ASHE). Comparisons between the two — including the city gaps — are illustrative, not like-for-like, because they differ in geography, in advertised-versus-actual pay, and in the disclosed-pay filter.
• External figures. All labour-market context (pay growth, vacancies, unemployment, youth unemployment, the national earned median) is sourced from the ONS and the cited reporting, linked inline — it is not ResuMinder data.