Someone in your business is about to ask for a 40% uplift on a software engineering band because the candidate has "AI experience". They will have a benchmark to back it up, and the benchmark will be real. It will also be the wrong number, because it measures where AI engineers happen to work rather than what the skill adds inside your company.
That is the recurring failure in software engineering benchmarking right now. The sources are not wrong. They are answering different questions, and almost nobody checks which question they answered before pasting the figure into a pay proposal.
The same UK job, three medians, a 55% spread
| Source | Median | What it actually measures | Period |
|---|---|---|---|
| ONS ASHE 2025 | £56,914 | Gross full-time pay, all employers, roughly 343,000 employee jobs | April 2025 |
| IT Jobs Watch | £70,000 | Median advertised salary, 3,800 postings | 6 months to 7 Aug 2026 |
| Levels.fyi | £88,452 | Self-reported total compensation including equity | 7 Aug 2026 |
Three reasons for the gap, in order of size.
Population. ONS covers every employer in the country, including the councils, insurers and NHS trusts that employ a very large share of British software engineers. Levels.fyi covers people motivated enough to submit a package, disproportionately at firms that pay equity. Its top of the UK table is Citadel and Jane Street, not a building society in Leeds.
Pay definition. ONS measures gross pay and excludes equity. Levels.fyi measures base plus bonus plus annualised stock. You cannot compare them and you certainly cannot fund one from a budget built on the other.
Date. ASHE 2025 is an April 2025 snapshot published with a lag. IT Jobs Watch is a rolling six months to last week. In a market this volatile, that alone is worth several points.
Current UK bands
| Level | Ravio base salary, verified payroll | IT Jobs Watch advertised | Levels.fyi total comp |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | not published | £44,500 (n=64) | £49,944 (IQR £39,135 to £76,743) |
| Mid (P3) | £69,600 (IQR £60,100 to £80,000) | £70,000 | £88,452 all levels (IQR £59,800 to £129,000) |
| Senior | £110,200 | £75,000 | £117,688 (IQR £87,459 to £162,798) |
| London, mid | £72,000 (IQR £65,000 to £84,000) | £100,000 all levels | £108,095 all levels |
Look hard at the senior row. Ravio and Levels.fyi put senior at £110,200 and £117,688. IT Jobs Watch puts it at £75,000. That is not a measurement error: it is evidence that "senior software engineer" in a British job advert frequently means five years of experience at a mid-market employer, while the same title in a benchmarking platform means a level-matched P4 at a funded technology company. If you lift a senior band off advertised data, you will underpay against the firms you actually lose candidates to.
Current US bands
| Cut | BLS OEWS, software developers annual wage | Levels.fyi total comp |
|---|---|---|
| 25th percentile | $105,210 | $137,000 |
| Median | $135,980 | $195,000 |
| 75th percentile | $171,980 | $282,000 |
| 90th percentile | $214,670 | $395,000 |
By level, Levels.fyi has entry level at $142,500 and senior at $250,820, with the senior 90th percentile at $500,000.
One caution on the government figure: the same BLS release is republished elsewhere as a $132,684 median. Even the official number has two circulating versions, so cite the release and the vintage, not just the pound or dollar amount.
Now the AI premium
Here are the two numbers your team will bring you.
Ravio, working from verified payroll data and matching people at the same job level, finds a 12% premium for AI talent on the professional or IC track and 3% on the management track. In cash: a P3 software engineer in the UK on £70,000 against a P3 AI engineer on £78,400.
Levels.fyi puts the US machine learning engineer median at $277,700 against $195,000 for software engineers generally. That is a 42% premium.
Both are accurate. Only one is a skills premium. The 42% is largely a company-mix effect: machine learning engineer submissions cluster at a handful of frontier labs, and the same site reports median packages of $870,000 at Anthropic and $860,000 at OpenAI. Strip out the employers and the premium is a fraction of the headline. The level-matched 12% is what the skill is worth when the company is held constant, which is the question you are actually asking.
The UK advertised market agrees with the smaller number. Machine learning roles carry a £75,000 median, down 6.25% year on year across 1,398 postings, barely distinguishable from the senior software engineer median.
Sources also disagree on direction, and that matters more
IT Jobs Watch has UK software engineer medians down 12.5% year on year, senior down 11.76%, London down 9.09%. Several recruiter guides published this year claim UK technology pay rose 7% to 8%. Both cannot be right about the same market.
Advertised medians are mix-sensitive. When the composition of what gets posted shifts, the median moves without a single person taking a pay cut. Recruiter guides, meanwhile, are built from placements the recruiter made, which is a self-selecting sample of roles that were competitive enough to need an agency.
Test for thin data before you trust any of it. That junior figure of £44,500, up 18.67%, rests on 64 postings. Sixty-four. It should not move a band.
Check vintage too. Dice's most recent published report has the average US technology salary at $112,521, up 1.2%, but it covers 2024. It is a historical document being quoted as current.
What the demand data says about your band shape
Indeed Hiring Lab has US software development postings roughly 27.5% below their pre-pandemic level, but up almost 15% since February 2025. Of that net increase between May 2025 and May 2026, 71% is senior roles and 37% is roles with AI in the title.
The bottom is where it hurts. SignalFire reports new graduate hiring down roughly 65% at the tech majors and 76% at early-stage startups against 2019, with front-end roles down about 25% and AI/ML engineer roles up 39%. Ravio puts the entry-level hiring rate at 8% this year against 35% twelve months ago.
So the market is not uniformly hot or cold. It is pulling apart, and a single flat software engineering band drawn from a blended median will be simultaneously too generous at entry level and too mean at senior.
If you are comparing across the Atlantic, size the gap honestly. Ravio has a P3 software engineer moving to San Francisco or New York at a median base of £120,800, a 79% increase on the London median. That is a structural difference, not a negotiating position.
The takeaway for this quarter
Set your band from level-matched data in your own pay definition, then treat AI capability as a 10% to 15% skill modifier inside the existing band rather than a new job family with its own scale. Reserve anything above that for the small number of roles where you are genuinely bidding against a frontier lab, and be able to name the lab. Widening the senior end and holding the entry end flat will track this market far better than a uniform uplift.
If you want a second pair of eyes on a band before it goes to your remuneration committee, talk to Synerjy.