Pay for IT roles shows sharp overall increase

As a whole, pay for IT roles has risen significantly over the past year, in part due to recruitment issues, although there is substantial variation by discipline. IDR’s latest study of pay for roles in this area found that lead data scientists appear to have benefited from the largest salary uptick, with the median salary here rising by 26%, from £72,754 in our 2025 sample to £91,575 in 2026. Median pay for IT enterprise architects rose by a similar amount (25%), from £72,000 in 2025 to £90,000 in 2026. Our research also found that pay for cyber security managers has risen sharply, in this case by 24% at the median, from £65,814 last year to £81,500 in 2026.

By contrast, data scientists’ pay rose by 4% at the median, from £50,347 in 2025 to £52,400 in 2026. While this is a comparatively low increase when looking at IT roles across the board, it is nonetheless still above the latest CPI inflation figure of 3.0%. By contrast, pay levels for IT project managers and test engineers both show more modest increases of 1% or less. Meanwhile, median pay for IT software development managers shows little to no change over the previous year.

Recruitment and retention

Survey participants were asked to indicate the state of the labour market for their IT, cyber, data and business intelligence roles in 2026. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of our sample reported that they are currently facing recruitment difficulties, the same proportion as found in our 2025 study. These difficulties are mainly due to competition from other firms (68%). A large majority (80%) of the sample also reported that the state of recruitment has remained the same when compared to a year ago, while just one participant observed an improvement.

Retention of such roles, however, is significantly less challenging, with less than two-fifths (37%) of our sample indicating that retention is either ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ difficult. Of the 37% that reported facing retention difficulties, the most common response has been to improve pay (73%). This may go some way towards explaining the significant uptick in median salaries over the last year, alongside the issues with recruitment.

 About the survey

The findings in this article are based on a study conducted by IDR in the first half of 2026. The survey asked employers about pay for a range of roles across their IT, cyber, data and business intelligence divisions. The survey received detailed responses from 33 organisations, together employing 339,751 employees in the UK. Almost half (47%) of respondents operate in private services. Manufacturing and primary sector employers constitute just below a third of the sample (28%). Nearly a fifth (19%) of the sample is made up of not-for-profit organisations, while the remaining proportion are public sector employers.

The full report of findings from the study includes salary tables for all 29 IT and Cyber roles within Development and Architecture, Cyber, Systems Maintenance, Management, Data Science and Business Intelligence. The roles are broken down by IDR job level, sector and geographical region and the report includes information on hours and holidays, market supplements and recruitment and retention issues. This year’s report also includes brief benchmarking data on a small number of AI roles.

The full report, which is priced at £449, or £404 for subscribers and participants, is available to purchase using our online order form. You can access the order form through the link below or contact us at sales@incomesdataresearch.com.