OpenAI London salaries average £2.3m per employee in 2025

The headline number mixes two very different kinds of pay. The UK company employed an average of 110 people in 2025. Together they received about £87 million in wages and salaries, which works out at an average basic salary of roughly £794,000.

The bigger slice came in shares. Share-based awards added about £168 million, bringing total staff costs to roughly £258 million. Equity alone made up nearly 65 percent of that bill.

Divide the full amount by the headcount and you get about £2.318 million per person. Measured against the median earnings of a full-time UK worker, using Office for National Statistics data, the average package was 58 times larger.

An average built this way hides a lot. Pay is understood to vary widely inside the office, with the largest packages going to the researchers who build OpenAI’s models. A handful of very large awards can drag the mean far above what a typical sales or support employee receives.

The share awards also aren’t cash in the bank. They are tied to OpenAI’s value as a private company, which can rise or fall, and the accounts don’t spell out exactly when each award vests. That said, the shares have done well for staff so far. OpenAI’s valuation went from around $150bn early in 2025 to around $500bn later that year, which is why equity counts for so much in the totals.

Some workers have already turned paper wealth into real money. During a funding round last year, about 600 OpenAI employees cashed in stock worth $6.6bn between them, or roughly $11m per person on average.

OpenAI declined to comment on the figures.

The pay story sits on top of fast growth. OpenAI UK Ltd’s revenue rose from £79.2 million a year earlier to £292.9 million in 2025, more than three times the previous level. The London arm provides sales, marketing and research services to the wider company rather than selling ChatGPT directly to British customers.

Reports differ on profit. The after-tax profit was about £20.3 million, while one report put the company’s profit at £31.7 million. Either way, the subsidiary made money while handing out record awards.

For a sense of scale, the £168 million in share awards alone was larger than the whole UK company’s revenue a year earlier. Google’s average pay in the UK last year, including shares, was around £400,000, a fraction of OpenAI’s figure.

For most people in British tech, this won’t change their pay slip. These are exceptional packages for a tiny group of specialists at one of the world’s most valuable private companies. They shouldn’t be read as a guide to what developers, designers or data analysts earn elsewhere in the UK.

But the effects ripple out. When AI labs offer this kind of money, banks, trading firms, universities and smaller startups compete for the same machine learning talent and often lose. Universities in particular may find it harder to keep researchers who can earn many times more in King’s Cross.

The spending also spreads beyond engineers. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has been advertising a £145,000 salary for a personal assistant to its London executives. Rival labs have offered packages worth tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds to land leading experts, and reports last year said Meta was offering multi-year deals worth several hundred million dollars.

If you work in AI or machine learning in the UK, the practical point is simple: demand for experienced researchers is extreme, and equity has become the main lever in pay talks. Understanding how share awards and vesting work matters as much as the base salary figure.

London is OpenAI’s biggest research base outside the United States. Its office in Westminster holds research, government affairs, sales and marketing staff, and the company is moving into a new headquarters in King’s Cross, the same area as Google DeepMind.

The company now employs around 200 people in the UK and plans to grow beyond 500 in the new space. Anthropic is expanding too, with plans for an 800-person UK team in an office near Regent’s Park.

Both firms have hired well-known British political figures. Former chancellor George Osborne joined OpenAI last December to lead its work with national governments, while Anthropic has taken on former prime minister Rishi Sunak as an adviser.

OpenAI is seeking new funding at a valuation of $1.4tn ahead of a planned stock market listing. Its float has reportedly been pushed back to 2027, while Anthropic’s listing could come as soon as November. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, has said the company will put its mission ahead of its share price.

A listing would put a public price on those share awards and could make some early employees extremely rich. The next set of UK accounts will show whether the London office’s pay kept climbing alongside its growing headcount.