Tech Salaries in London 2026: What Engineers Actually Earn in the UK

London is the undisputed tech capital of Europe. Not just by headcount - though it has more tech workers than any other European city - but by compensation, employer diversity, and career optionality.

What makes London unique in the European context is the financial services overlay. The City of London and Canary Wharf house some of the world's most sophisticated quantitative trading firms, investment banks, and fintech companies. These employers pay engineers like they pay traders - well above the European norm. When a hedge fund offers £150K for a senior ML engineer, every Big Tech office and startup in the city adjusts upward.

The result: London tech salaries sit in a tier of their own in Europe, meaningfully above Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin.

Here is what every major tech role actually pays in London in 2026. All figures are in GBP (£) and represent base salary before bonus and equity.

ML Engineer - £60K-£130K+

Machine learning engineers in London earn the highest base salaries in the city, driven by intense competition between fintech, hedge funds, and Big Tech AI teams. Salary range: £60K-£130K+ Median: ~£85K

London's ML engineer market is shaped by quantitative finance. Firms like G-Research, Man Group, Citadel Securities, and Two Sigma London pay £100K-£150K+ for ML engineers who can build trading signals and risk models. DeepMind (Google) in King's Cross is one of the world's premier AI research labs, paying top-of-market for research engineers.

Applied ML roles at fintechs (Revolut, Monzo, Checkout.com), healthtech companies, and adtech firms pay £70K-£100K. The key differentiator is production ML experience - engineers who can take models from research to deployed systems at scale command a significant premium over those focused purely on experimentation.

The LLM boom has created a new tier of ML engineering roles in London, with startups like Stability AI, Wayve, and PolyAI competing for talent alongside established players.

DevOps Engineer - £55K-£110K

DevOps engineers in London earn premium salaries driven by the financial services sector's extreme uptime requirements and regulatory compliance needs. Salary range: £55K-£110K Median: ~£75K

Financial institutions set the standard for DevOps in London. Banks and trading firms need infrastructure that meets FCA regulatory requirements, SOX compliance, and disaster recovery mandates - all while supporting rapid deployment cycles. This creates demand for engineers with expertise in Kubernetes, Terraform, and CI/CD pipelines that can operate under audit constraints.

Platform engineering roles - building internal developer platforms that abstract infrastructure complexity - command the highest salaries. London's SRE market is particularly strong, with Google, Meta, Amazon, and Cloudflare all maintaining significant reliability engineering teams in the city.

DevOps engineers with financial services experience and security clearance earn at the top of the range, as compliance expertise is scarce and non-transferable from other sectors.

Data Engineer - £50K-£105K

Data engineers in London build the pipelines that power trading systems, financial analytics, and the data infrastructure underlying Europe's largest tech ecosystem. Salary range: £50K-£105K Median: ~£72K

London's data engineering market benefits from the sheer volume of data generated by financial services. Trading firms need real-time data pipelines with sub-millisecond latency. Banks need data warehouses that meet regulatory reporting requirements across multiple jurisdictions. Fintechs need event-driven architectures processing millions of transactions daily.

Outside finance, media companies (BBC, Sky, the Financial Times), e-commerce platforms (ASOS, Deliveroo), and adtech firms are major employers. Tools like Spark, Kafka, Airflow, dbt, and Snowflake dominate the London data stack.

Data engineers with experience in real-time streaming, data mesh architectures, or ML feature engineering earn at the top of the range.

Security Engineer - £55K-£115K

Security engineers in London benefit from the city's concentration of financial institutions, all subject to FCA and PRA regulatory requirements around cybersecurity. Salary range: £55K-£115K Median: ~£78K

London is one of the world's most important cybersecurity markets. The Bank of England, FCA, and NCSC set high standards for financial infrastructure security, creating consistent demand for security engineers across the sector. Penetration testing, application security, cloud security, and GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) roles are all well-compensated.

The government and defence sector adds another layer of demand, with GCHQ, defence contractors, and critical national infrastructure operators hiring security engineers - often at slightly lower base salaries but with security clearance premiums and strong pension packages.

Security engineers with OSCP, CISSP, or cloud security certifications (AWS Security Specialty, Azure Security Engineer) earn at the top of the range.

Cloud Architect - £55K-£120K

Cloud architects in London are in high demand as enterprises across financial services, healthcare, and government accelerate cloud adoption. Salary range: £55K-£120K Median: ~£80K

London's cloud market is driven by enterprise cloud migration. Banks moving from on-premises data centres to AWS, Azure, and GCP need architects who can design secure, compliant, multi-region architectures. The regulatory overlay (FCA cloud guidance, data residency requirements, operational resilience mandates) adds complexity that pushes salaries above generic cloud roles.

AWS dominates the London market, followed by Azure (strong in enterprise and government) and GCP (strong in startups and data-intensive workloads). Multi-cloud expertise commands a premium, as most large enterprises use at least two providers.

Backend Engineer - £50K-£105K

Backend engineers in London work across a diverse set of industries, with financial services and fintech offering the highest compensation. Salary range: £50K-£105K Median: ~£72K

London backend engineering is distinguished by the scale and reliability requirements of financial systems. Low-latency trading platforms, real-time payment processing (Open Banking, FPS, SEPA), and high-frequency data systems all demand backend engineers with deep systems knowledge.

Java remains dominant in financial services backend work, though Go, Kotlin, and Rust are growing fast at fintechs and startups. Python is standard for data-heavy backends. Engineers with experience in event-driven architectures, microservices at scale, and distributed systems earn premium compensation.

Big Tech offices (Google, Amazon, Meta) pay at the top of the market, with senior backend engineers earning £90K-£120K+ base before stock.

Software Engineer - £45K-£100K

Software engineers in London have the largest job market of any European city, with thousands of open positions across Big Tech, finance, startups, and enterprise. Salary range: £45K-£100K Median: ~£65K

The breadth of London's software engineering market is its defining feature. New graduates start at £35K-£55K at most companies, rising to £45K-£65K at Big Tech and top fintechs. Mid-level engineers (3-5 years) earn £55K-£80K, and senior engineers command £80K-£100K+ base.

Total compensation at Big Tech (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple) reaches £100K-£180K+ for senior engineers when stock grants are included. Hedge funds pay £90K-£150K+ in base salary with cash bonuses.

London's software engineering market is accessible to international talent through the Skilled Worker visa, making it the primary European destination for engineers from outside the EU.

Data Scientist - £48K-£100K

Data scientists in London work across finance, pharma, media, and technology - with quantitative finance roles paying the most. Salary range: £48K-£100K Median: ~£68K

Quantitative data science roles at hedge funds and trading firms pay at the top of the range - £80K-£120K+ for experienced practitioners with strong statistical modelling skills. These roles often require advanced degrees (PhD preferred) and expertise in time-series analysis, Bayesian methods, or causal inference.

Outside finance, data scientists at pharma companies (AstraZeneca, GSK), media (BBC, Sky), and tech companies (Deliveroo, Monzo, Revolut) earn £55K-£85K. The shift toward "full-stack" data science - where practitioners are expected to deploy their own models - has pushed salaries up for engineers with production ML skills.

Product Manager - £50K-£105K

Product managers in London operate across a diverse industry landscape, with fintech and Big Tech paying the most. Salary range: £50K-£105K Median: ~£72K

London product management benefits from the city's industry diversity. PMs at fintech companies build payment products, lending platforms, and banking features under regulatory constraints. PMs at media companies build content discovery and subscriber engagement tools. PMs at healthtech companies navigate NHS procurement and clinical workflow integration.

Technical PMs - those with engineering backgrounds who can engage directly with technical architecture decisions - earn at the top of the range. PMs at Big Tech companies earn £80K-£120K+ including stock.

Frontend Engineer - £45K-£95K

Frontend engineers in London build user-facing applications across financial dashboards, media platforms, e-commerce, and consumer products. Salary range: £45K-£95K Median: ~£62K

London's frontend market is split between two worlds: consumer-facing applications (e-commerce, media, fintech apps) and enterprise/financial interfaces (trading platforms, banking portals, analytics dashboards). Financial services frontends command higher salaries due to real-time data requirements, complex state management, and the need for pixel-perfect accuracy in numerical displays.

React and TypeScript dominate the London frontend stack. Next.js adoption is growing rapidly across fintechs and startups. Engineers with design systems experience, accessibility expertise, or web performance skills are particularly scarce and well-compensated.

UX Designer - £40K-£90K

UX designers in London work across one of the world's most design-conscious tech ecosystems, with strong demand in fintech, healthtech, and enterprise software. Salary range: £40K-£90K Median: ~£58K

London's UX market values designers who can work across research, interaction design, and prototyping. Fintech UX is particularly well-paid because of the complexity of designing financial products that are both compliant and user-friendly. Designers who can translate complex financial concepts into intuitive interfaces command premium salaries.

Senior UX designers and design leads at Big Tech and fintechs earn £75K-£100K+. Head of Design roles at scale-ups can reach £100K-£130K+.

Full Stack Developer - £45K-£95K

Full stack developers in London are valued at startups and scale-ups where versatility matters more than deep specialization. Salary range: £45K-£95K Median: ~£62K

London's startup ecosystem - particularly in fintech, healthtech, and proptech - is the primary employer of full stack developers. Early-stage companies need engineers who can build React frontends, Node.js or Python APIs, manage databases, and deploy to cloud infrastructure.

TypeScript across the stack (React + Node.js/Express) is the most common full stack configuration in London. Engineers with this profile plus cloud deployment skills (AWS, Vercel, Docker) are consistently in demand.

Why London Pays What It Does

Three factors shape London tech compensation:

Financial services premium. The City and Canary Wharf create a salary floor that does not exist in other European cities. When hedge funds pay £150K for engineers, every employer in the ecosystem must respond. This effect reaches beyond finance - startups and Big Tech adjust compensation upward to retain talent. English language advantage. London is the only major European tech hub where English is the native language. This makes it the default destination for US companies opening European offices, and the easiest landing spot for international tech talent. The resulting talent density drives both opportunity and competition. Visa accessibility. The UK's Skilled Worker visa and Global Talent visa provide clear pathways for international engineers. Most large tech companies and many startups are licensed sponsors. This attracts global talent, which raises the quality bar - and employers pay accordingly to compete.

London vs Other European Tech Hubs

London wins on absolute salary and employer diversity. Berlin wins on cost of living. Amsterdam and Dublin offer competitive salaries with lower rent than London. The right choice depends on career goals, lifestyle preferences, and visa situation.

The Bottom Line

London is where you go in Europe if you want the highest salaries, the most employer options, and the clearest path from engineer to tech leader. The cost of living is high, but so is the ceiling. No other European city offers the same combination of Big Tech, finance, and startup opportunities in a single market.

If you are evaluating a London offer or planning a move, benchmark your specific role against our salary data:

ML Engineer - £60K-£130K+

DevOps Engineer - £55K-£110K

Data Engineer - £50K-£105K

Security Engineer - £55K-£115K

Cloud Architect - £55K-£120K

Backend Engineer - £50K-£105K

Software Engineer - £45K-£100K

Data Scientist - £48K-£100K

Product Manager - £50K-£105K

Frontend Engineer - £45K-£95K

UX Designer - £40K-£90K

Full Stack Developer - £45K-£95K

Not sure if your experience matches UK market rates? Try our free AI resume analysis tool - upload your CV, paste a job advert, and see your salary fit score in seconds.

Or compare London against US and Canadian cities: San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin, and Toronto, or see the global picture in our highest paying tech jobs ranking.