The gender pay gap UK 2026 reporting cycle has closed, and the numbers tell a familiar story with a sharper edge. Progress is real but glacial, and the headline figures hide much bigger gaps for women over 40, women in finance and women in part-time public sector roles.
This year is different for another reason. The Employment Rights Act, which secured Royal Assent on 18 December 2025, marks a significant strengthening of the UK’s workplace equality framework. From April 2026, employers can publish equality action plans voluntarily, and from 2027 they must. Here is what the fresh data says about women at work, and what it means for your career, your business and your pay negotiations.
The headline gender pay gap UK 2026 figures
The Office for National Statistics remains the anchor source. In April 2025, median hourly earnings (excluding overtime) for full-time employees were £20.27 for men and £18.87 for women; for part-time employees, they were £13.85 for men and £14.25 for women. That works out at a median hourly pay gap of 6.9% less for women than for men in April 2025 for full-time employees, while median hourly pay for part-time employees was 2.9% higher for women than for men.
Look across all employees, though, and the picture shifts. In 2025, the difference between average hourly earnings for men and women in the United Kingdom for all workers was 12.8 percent, compared with 6.9 percent for full-time workers, and -2.9 percent for part-time workers. That 12.8% figure matters because it captures the reality of how women actually work in the UK, with more women in part-time and lower-paid roles pulling the whole-economy figure much wider than the full-time headline.
Employer-level data adds another layer. Analysis of the mandatory reporting portal shows a decrease of 0.5% in the mean pay gap from 11.2% in 2024/25 to 10.7% in 2025/26, and the median hourly pay gap has decreased from 8.6% in 2024/25 to 8.1% in 2025/26. Half a percentage point a year is progress. It is not urgency.
Who has reported, and who has not
Mandatory reporting still applies to any organisation with 250 or more employees on the snapshot date. Public sector employers must report by 30 March 2026, while private sector employers and voluntary organisations must report by 4 April 2026. The compliance picture in early 2026 was patchy. As at 30 January 2026, just 12.98% of in-scope employers had reported, leaving more than 85% yet to comply.
Late filing carries reputational risk more than a hefty fine, but the Equality and Human Rights Commission can and does pursue non-compliant employers. For women researching prospective employers, the Gender Pay Gap Service on gov.uk is the single most useful public database in UK workplace transparency. You can look up any reporting employer, view five years of data and compare across a sector before an interview.
Why the median matters more than the mean
Reports publish both. The mean is skewed by a handful of very high earners, who are still mostly men. The median tells you what the typical woman and typical man in that organisation earn per hour. If the median gap is high but the mean is low, women cluster at the bottom. If the mean is high but the median is low, women are missing from the top. Both stories matter, and both should shape how you read any employer’s numbers.
Where the gender pay gap UK 2026 data hurts most
The industry breakdown is where the averages fall apart. For full-time workers, the gender pay gap is largest in the financial and insurance industry, and smallest in the transportation and storage industry. The scale of the finance gap is striking. British men in the finance and insurance sector earn 32.2% more than British women, and the gender pay gap for administrative and secretarial occupations is 21.9%.
Part-time roles in the public sector are another blind spot. The gender pay gap for part-time employees in the public sector in the UK is 20%. That is a huge gap in a sector often thought of as more equal, and it reflects the concentration of women in lower-graded part-time posts within otherwise better-paid organisations.
Age is the other multiplier. The gender pay gap is larger for employees aged 40 years and over than for those aged under 40 years, and the gender pay gap is larger among high-paid employees than among lower-paid employees, with women’s share in high-paying occupations still lagging. The message for younger women is not that the gap has gone away. It is that the gap tends to open when women in their late thirties and forties hit the intersection of caring responsibilities, promotion decisions and reduced hours.
The new equality action plan duty
This is the structural shift in the gender pay gap UK 2026 framework. The UK government has launched new measures requiring large employers to address gender pay disparities and improve support for staff experiencing the menopause, spearheaded by Women and Equalities Minister Bridget Phillipson, with companies of 250 or more employees publishing detailed action plans on a voluntary basis from April 2026, becoming mandatory by spring 2027.
The Government published its first set of guidance on pay gap and menopause action plans on March 4, 2026. The design is deliberately prescriptive. Organisations must commit to at least two actions, at least one related to closing the pay gap and one related to supporting employees experiencing the menopause, from a prescribed government list, submitted via the government portal, with the action plan reviewed and updated each year.
Two things follow. First, employers can no longer publish a gap number and say nothing about what they will do. Second, menopause support is now formally part of the workplace equality conversation, not a soft benefit. For women over 40, this is one of the more significant workplace policy changes in a decade.
What to look for in an employer’s action plan
- Specific, dated commitments rather than vague pledges
- Named responsibility, ideally at board or executive level
- Actions on progression and promotion, not just recruitment
- Menopause provisions that go beyond a policy document
- Transparent salary bands in job adverts and internal moves
What the gender pay gap UK 2026 data means for women in business
If you are employed, the reporting portal is a negotiation tool. Before your next pay review, look up your employer, note the quartile data and check whether women are under-represented in the upper pay quartile. That gives you evidence, not just a request. If you sit in a sector like finance or professional services, the sector-wide 20% plus gap is context you can name directly.
If you are self-employed or running your own business, the data still shapes your market. Women continue to be under-represented in high-paying occupations and over-represented in part-time public sector roles, which affects how female clients price their time and how you price yours. Under-charging is a habit that mirrors the pay gap from the outside in.
If you run a business with staff, you are almost certainly under the 250-employee reporting threshold. That does not exempt you from the substance. Publishing your own median pay gap voluntarily, even at ten or twenty staff, is a growing signal in recruitment. It also forces the internal conversation that many small employers avoid.
Where the gender pay gap UK 2026 story goes next
The direction of travel from 2026 into 2027 is toward more transparency, not less. The right-hand side of the reporting data continues to show financial services sectors with the largest pay gaps, consistent with prior years, and for the upcoming reporting year 2026/27 it is voluntary for organisations to produce a plan, becoming mandatory from spring 2027. The EU is moving on pay transparency in parallel, and UK-headquartered employers with EU operations will feel the pressure from both directions.
For women reading the numbers, the honest summary is this. The gender pay gap UK 2026 data shows the full-time gap slowly closing, the all-employee gap barely moving, and the finance and over-40s gaps still wide enough to reshape a career. The new action plan duty is the first serious attempt in years to make employers do something about it, rather than simply report it.
For more UK-specific context on women at work, read our Women in Business: Key UK Facts page for the latest figures. If the pay gap is part of what is pushing you toward running your own business, our guides on why women make great entrepreneurs and addressing the disparity for women in business are the natural next reads.