The UK’s gender pay gap is higher than the EU and OECD average, and more than double that of France and Spain.
A new study shows that the UK’s gender pay gap is wider than official estimates suggest—by about one percentage point—a small but significant difference.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) told Euronews Business that it has recently introduced a number of improvements.
So, how much less do women in the UK earn compared to men? Why does new research suggest the ONS has been underestimating the gender pay gap for decades? And how does the UK’s gap compare with the rest of Europe?
How much do women in the UK earn?
According to the ONS, in April 2024, median hourly earnings (excluding overtime) for full-time employees were £19.24 (€22.5) for men and £17.88 (€20.9) for women in the UK. This equates to a 7.0% gender pay gap, down from 7.5% in 2023. In other words, for every £1,000 earned by men, women earn £930.
Among part-time employees, men earned £13.00 (€15.2) per hour compared with £13.40 (€15.6) for women. This is a -3% pay gap, meaning women earn slightly more than men.
However, across employees of all types of contracts, the gap widens to £18.26 (€21.3) vs £15.87 (€18.5), a 13.1% pay gap, which translates to women earning £869 for every £1,000 earned by men.
Research: Gap is wider by one percentage point
Prof John Forth, from City St Georges, University of London and his colleagues published research in late August 2025 in the British Journal of Industrial Relations. They found that the gender pay gap in the UK “has been consistently under-estimated over the last 20 years, by a small but noteworthy margin of around one percentage point”.
The study argues that the data used to calculate the gender pay gap fails to properly weight jobs in small, young, private-sector organisations. The researchers re-estimated the size of the UK gender pay gap by developing and applying a more representative revised weighting scheme.
ONS: The overall impact would be small
An ONS spokesperson told Euronews Business that this research raises some interesting questions about the best way to weight their survey data. “However it’s worth noting that, even if new methods were used, the overall impact on the gender pay gap would be small,” the spokesperson said.
“We have recently introduced a number of improvements to the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, with more planned in the coming years.”
In the UK, median gross annual earnings for full-time employees were £37,430 (€43,697) in April 2024. Across all employees, if a man earned £37,430, a woman would earn £4,903 less based on the official gender pay gap of 13.1%. If the gap is instead taken as 14.1%, the shortfall rises to £5,278. This “small” one-percentage-point difference equates to around £375 at the median earning level.
The gap is highest in skilled trades occupations
The gender pay gap is highest in skilled trades occupations, while it is lowest in caring, leisure, and other service occupations.
Occupations with a higher percentage of women tend to have lower median hourly earnings. Most jobs where women make up more than 50% of the workforce fall below £20/hour, while higher-paying roles around £30/hour have a lower proportion of women. This also indicates a gender imbalance in both representation and pay across sectors.
UK gender pay gap exceeds EU and OECD averages
According to OECD data, the UK ranked 8th out of 31 European countries in 2023 with a gender pay gap of 13.3%. This is higher than both the EU average of 9.4% and the OECD average of 11.3%.
Among the five largest European economies, the gap is particularly high in Germany (14.2%) and the UK, more than double that of France (6.2%), Spain (6.2%), and Italy (4.1%).
The highest gender pay gap is in Estonia, where women earn 24.7% less than men, while the lowest is in Luxembourg at just 0.4%.
The UK figure differs slightly from the ONS estimate due to differences in reference periods and methodology, but the OECD dataset is used for international comparisons.
In simple terms, a positive figure shows how much less women earn compared with men. Salary transparency is another key part of the issue.