Junior trades & construction salaries in the UK

Transparency

Most of these employers will not say what they pay

33 of 70 junior trades & construction listings publish a salary. The other 37 say “competitive”, or “dependent on experience”, or nothing at all — which for somebody applying to their first job means finding out how much it pays after the interview.

47% of junior trades & construction roles state a salary. Every figure on this page comes from that minority, and no honest number can come from anywhere else.

Geography

Where the roles actually are

London carries 16 roles of the 39 we could place — 41% of the located trades & construction listings on the board. The rest are spread thinly enough that most regions have fewer roles than a single London borough.

• London16
• East Midlands6
• West Midlands5
• Scotland4
• South East4
• East of England2

Of 70 listings, 39 name a region specific enough to count. The rest give a town we could not place, or are advertised UK-wide.

Comparison

How this compares with other junior work

The medians across every family we can measure sit within a few thousand pounds of each other, and their middle halves overlap almost completely. The spread inside trades & construction alone is £7,500 — wider than the gap between the best and worst paid family on the board.

Which field you enter matters less to your first salary than which employer you land in.

Requirements

What these listings ask for

The skills named most often across junior trades & construction adverts on the board. They are what the listings say, not what the job needs — a distinction worth keeping in mind when one of them looks surprising.

• Recruitment
• Testing
• Compliance
• Microsoft 365
• Customer service
• Health & safety
• Excel
• Procurement