CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce UK is a regional version of CompTIA's State of the Tech Workforce initiative, providing an in-depth look at employment, economic impact, technology trends, salaries, hiring activity and more across the regions and metropolitan areas of the United Kingdom.
Net tech employment continues to grow
The tech workforce consists of two primary components, represented as a single figure by the “net tech employment” designation. The foundation is the set of technology professionals working in technical positions, such as IT support, network engineering, software development, data science, and related roles. Many of these professionals work for technology companies (44%), but many others are employed by organizations across every industry sector in the UK economy (56%). The second component consists of the business professionals employed by technology companies. These professionals – encompassing sales, marketing, finance, HR, operations and management, play an important role in supporting the development and delivery of the technology products and services used throughout the economy. Approximately 35% of the net tech-employment total consists of tech industry business professionals.
Net tech employment in the United Kingdom reached an estimated 2,148,205 workers in 2025, a 0.5% increase over the previous year. Net tech employment is projected to increase by 1.02% in 2026. Since 2020, net tech employment increased by an estimated 144,784 net-new jobs. Net tech employment saw a slight decline between 2023 and 2024 but has shown growth since then. Net tech employment accounted for approximately 6.4% of the overall U.K. workforce in 2025.
By 2031, projections from Lightcast put the base of tech occupation employment at approximately 1.442 million.
Among the components of net tech employment, the tech sector side of the equation grew at 0.02% year over year, while the occupation side across all industry sectors experienced a gain of 0.9% year over year. Looking ahead, tech sector and tech occupation gains are projected to be 1.1% for both.
Tech occupation employment over the next 10 years is expected to grow higher than the rate of overall employment across the economy.
Tech is important to metro areas across the UK
The top four metropolitan areas employ a little more than 763,000 tech industry and tech occupation workers, a little more than 1 in 3 tech workers in the nation. The London and Bristol areas saw the highest increases in net tech employment year over year. At more than 7%, London, Edinburgh, Leeds, and Bristol have the highest concentration of net tech employment as a percentage of their overall employment bases. Compared to the national tech employment concentration benchmark of 6.4%, six metro areas had the same or higher rate, confirming the importance of technology to a far-reaching set of cities across the U.K.
Premium in earnings associated with tech jobs roles
Across all the tech occupation categories covered in this report, the median salary, also referred to as the 50th percentile or midpoint, was an estimated £52,840, for the most recent year of available data. This figure is 53% more than the median wage across all occupations of the U.K. labor force, reflecting the premium in earnings associated with in-demand tech job roles.
