Which jobs pay the most? It's a question that has preoccupied most of us at some stage or other, but not one that is often straightforward to answer.
Arguably the most reliable data on pay comes from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (Ashe), conducted every year by the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 findings of which were released last week.
"Ashe is about as good as you can get, but like a lot of measures it doesn't tell the whole story," says William Brown, the Montague Burton professor of industrial relations at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics. "It uses clever ways of estimating where you don't get responses, but it still only applies to employees, and that itself is difficult because the notion of a full-time employee is increasingly less common."
So what can Ashe tell us about what people earn – or perhaps, more to the point, what doesn't it say? There are certain factors that have to be taken into account. We have looked at job groups with a gross full-time median annual salary of over £40,000. The Ashe data is taken from a sample of just 1% of employees who pay tax via PAYE. More significantly, Ashe does not include the self-employed – and with that, the high-flying entrepreneurs or celebrities who help constitute the country's really top earners. Well-known people we may think of as being conventionally employed, such as footballers or TV presenters, for example, are often self-employed and charging for contracted services.
Then there are the much-discussed financial traders and executives of the City, where it has been hard to gauge who earns what because conventional salaries are supplemented with bonuses and long-term share options. "Ashe is weak on the add-ons, bonuses, shares and goodness knows what," agrees Professor Brown. "Plus I can't think of any survey that picks up the legal and accounting partners, directors of multiple companies and so on."
This may explain why Ashe figures for directors and financial workers look surprisingly low – although that may change in coming years as many banks bolster basic pay rates for key employees to comply with new Financial Services Authority rules on bonuses.
