The average salary for a frontend developer in UK is £51,600
The Average salary for a frontend developer in the UK is estimated to be £51,600. That’s £4,300 per month or £3,200 per month after tax (~25%).
Entry-level frontend developers in the UK start at around £41,000 per year (Glassdoor). Experienced senior frontend developer positions earn upwards of £60,000 per year with bonus and equity options. We’ve included a few estimates from various salary sites in the UK to give you a more accurate picture of the average engineer salary. You can check out our salary calculator for more specific information.
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Salary by Experience
Frontend developers in the UK tend to earn less than their developer counterparts. We can see that from an entry level position to a mid level position the pay doesn’t increase much. According to talent.com and some other sources entry level positions are probably paying closer to the £35k range for mid-small companies. Let’s explore salary ranges for the three main categories junior, mid, and senior.
Taxes in UK 🇬🇧
It’s important to understand how taxes in the UK affect your take home pay. Your contract might state £5,000 monthly gross pay but your bank account will only receive £3,500. As a frontend developer working in the UK, you’ll most likely be in the 40% tax bracket. Here’s an example of net pay versus gross pay.
On a £50,000 salary, your take home pay will be £37,198 after tax and National Insurance. This equates to £3,100 per month and £715 per week. If you work 5 days per week, this is £143 per day, or £18 per hour at 40 hours per week.
Salary by type and technology
Depending on what frontend technology a developer is skilled in, pay might vary. For example a Vue.js developer might receive a higher salary than a React developer. A lot of the differences have to do with job opportunities and availability of skilled developers. The less developers, the more demand, the higher the salary can be negotiated. Here’s a breakdown of salary by technology.
The best way to identify what technologies are the most in demand in the UK is to look at the number of job postings in a year. Yahoo finance examined this data in 2020, and found that JavaScript skills were the second most desired under SQL (data). While there are more opportunities job postings for JS developers compared with Java ones, the pay is usually less.
Average salary by city
When we look at the median frontend developer salaries in different cities across the UK, some interesting patterns emerge. In London, the median salary is £49,000, which comes as no surprise considering its status as a major tech hub. Manchester follows with a median salary of £43,000, indicating strong demand for frontend developers in the city. Edinburgh, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow all offer similar median salaries ranging from £37,000 to £41,000, providing competitive compensation for frontend developers. Birmingham, Leeds, and Belfast have slightly lower median salaries, ranging from £37,000 to £38,000. These variations highlight the differences in frontend developer salaries across cities, with London and Manchester offering higher earning potential.
Salary by Company in UK
Salary averages only go so far, sometimes it’s more helpful to see specific salaries at real companies to get an idea of what other software engineers are earning. These are not the best companies in the UK but a handful of some of the larger companies in the country where devs have reported salaries. Majority of these companies are paying software engineers between £40k - £50k. While far from the highest paying developer salaries, these salaries are generally considered to be good.
