What Social Media Marketing Jobs Pay UK

Every job I list has a salary on it. That's the whole rule. No "competitive", no "DOE", no "£ negotiable depending on experience".

Which means that after a month of listing, I'm sitting on something most people in this industry don't have: a pile of real, published, verified UK salaries for social media, marketing, content and comms roles.

So I ran the numbers.

This is 94 UK roles from 86 different employers, listed between 22 July and 18 August 2026. Every single one had a salary attached before it went on the site. I didn't scrape these, I didn't estimate them, and I didn't ask anyone to self-report. They're the actual figures the actual employers actually published.

Here's what I found.

The headline number: £40,640

That's the median UK salary across everything I listed this month.

Not the average — the median, the middle of the pack. Half the roles paid more, half paid less. I'm using the median because averages get wrecked by one Head of Marketing on £106k dragging everything upwards.

Some context on the spread:

• 28% of roles paid under £30,000
• 29% of roles paid £50,000 or more

So it's roughly a third at the bottom, a third at the top, a third in the middle. Which sounds tidy until you remember that "under £30,000" in 2026, in a job that usually requires a degree and three years of experience, is not a lot of money.

What you get paid at each level

This is the bit everyone actually wants.

A few things worth pulling out.

The jump from Executive to Manager is the big one. £30,622 to £43,808 — that's a £13k step, and it's the largest single leap on the ladder. If you're an executive or officer wondering whether it's worth pushing for that manager title, this is your answer. It's worth roughly 43%.

Entry level starts just under £26k. Nine roles in the assistant/apprentice/graduate bracket, and the median lands at £25,972. The lowest I listed all month was £24,000. Given that these roles almost always ask for a portfolio, some existing experience, and often a degree, that's tight.

Senior/Lead pays more than Head/Director in my data, which is odd. £62,072 versus £60,000. I don't think that's real — it's small samples doing what small samples do. Twelve roles in one bucket, ten in the other, and a couple of low-paying charity Head of roles pull that second number down. Treat those two rows as "broadly the same, somewhere around £60k" rather than a genuine inversion. I'll keep tracking it and see if it holds.

Going into the office costs you £9,000

This is the finding I didn't expect.

On-site roles paid a median of £33,500. Hybrid paid £42,565. That's a £9,065 gap for the privilege of being in a building five days a week.

I want to be careful here, because this almost certainly isn't employers charging you rent for a desk. It's more likely that the kinds of organisations that still require full-time attendance — smaller charities, theatres, zoos, local venues, retail head offices — are also the organisations with less money. The pattern is real in the data even if the cause is about who is hiring on-site rather than the office itself.

But whatever's driving it, the practical advice is the same: if you're only applying to on-site roles, you are fishing in the lower-paid end of this market. Widening to hybrid opens up both more jobs and better ones.

Also worth noting: hybrid absolutely dominates. 56 of 94 roles. Fully remote is now the smallest category at 18. The industry has settled on two or three days in, and the fully-remote gold rush of a few years ago is over.

Social media pays less than marketing

The gaps here are smaller than I expected, and honestly smaller than the level-based gaps above. Where you sit on the ladder matters far more than which specialism you pick.

But the order is telling. Content sits at the bottom — nearly £5k below marketing. Content roles are still being treated as the junior, executional end of the function, even when the job description asks you to shoot, edit, write, schedule and report.

44% of employers still won't give you a range

Here's the transparency finding, and it's the one that annoys me most.

Of the 94 roles I listed — remember, these are the good ones, the ones that published a salary at all - 41 gave a single number rather than a range. No band. No "£35,000 to £42,000". Just one figure, take it or leave it.

For the 53 that did publish a proper range, the median band was £5,800 wide - about 16% from bottom to top.

A single figure isn't automatically bad. Public sector and charity roles often work off fixed pay scales, and a fixed number is honest about that. But when a private company posts one number with no band, it usually means one of two things: the salary genuinely isn't negotiable, or they'd rather you didn't know it was.

And remember — this is the transparent half of the market. Every one of these employers cleared the bar of publishing something. The listings I reject every week, the ones that say "competitive salary" and nothing else, don't appear in this data at all.

For comparison: the US

I list US remote roles too, and the gap is brutal.

The median US role I listed this month paid $95,000. At current rates that's somewhere around £70,000 - comfortably more than the UK median of £40,640, and roughly what a UK Senior or Head of would earn.

American managers had a median of $102,500. American senior/lead roles came in at $140,000.

I'm not posting that to make anyone miserable. I'm posting it because a lot of UK marketers genuinely don't know how large the gap is, and it's useful information when you're deciding whether to chase a US remote role, or when you're negotiating and need a sense of what the ceiling looks like elsewhere.

How I did this

• Source: every job listed on samssocialmediaclub.com between 22 July and 18 August 2026.
• Sample: 94 UK roles from 86 employers. Roles listed in other currencies were analysed separately.
• Salary requirement: every listing on the site must have a published salary. That's a condition of being listed, not something I filled in afterwards.
• Midpoint method: where a range was published I used the midpoint. Where a single figure was published I used that figure.
• Annualising: hourly and monthly rates were converted to an annual equivalent (37.5-hour week, 52 weeks).
• Levels: assigned from job titles. "Head of" and "Director" to the top band, "Senior" and "Lead" to the next, and so on.
• Exclusions: four listings had the wrong currency attached in my system and were removed rather than left to distort the figures.

The honest caveat: 94 roles is a real sample but it's not a huge one, and it's one month. Some of the level breakdowns rest on nine or ten roles each, which is thin. Read this as a solid snapshot rather than the final word.

I'm going to run this again every month. Twelve months from now the trend lines will be worth a lot more than any single month's numbers, and I'll be able to show you whether entry-level pay is actually moving or just sitting still.

What to do with this

If you're job hunting. Use the level table as your floor, not your target. If you're an experienced executive being offered £27k, you're being offered below the median for your level and you have a number to say so with.

If you're negotiating. "The median for this level in current UK listings is £X" is a much stronger sentence than "I was hoping for a bit more." You now have the X.

If you're hiring. If you're advertising a manager role at £32k, you're £11k below the market median and you're going to struggle. And if you're posting without a salary at all, you're not in this dataset - which means you're also not in the consideration set of everyone who read it.

I list salary-transparent jobs in social media, marketing, content and comms every weekday. No "competitive salary". No scraping. Just me, going through them by hand. If you want them in your inbox Monday to Friday, subscribe to the newsletter.