Pay for IT roles show sharp increase overall
As a whole, pay for IT roles has risen significantly over the past year, 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% to £91,575 in 2026. Median pay for IT enterprise architects rose by a similar amount (25%) to £90,000 in 2026. Our latest research also found that median pay for cyber security managers has risen sharply, in this case by 24%, to £81,500 in 2026.
Meanwhile, data scientists’ pay rose by 4% to a median value of £52,400 in 2026. ‘This is a comparatively low increase when looking at IT roles across the board, but it is nonetheless still above the latest CPI inflation figure of 2.8%’ explains Alyssa Withers, Researcher at IDR. Pay levels for IT project managers and test engineers both show modest increases of 1% or less, whereas median pay for IT software development managers shows little to no change over the previous year.
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 the sample reported that they are currently facing recruitment difficulties, the same proportion as found in IDR’s 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 these roles, however, is significantly less challenging, with under two-fifths (37%) of the sample indicating that retention is either ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ difficult. Of the 37% that reported facing retention difficulties, the most common response to address these has been to improve pay (73%). ‘This may go some way towards explaining the significant uptick in median salaries over the last year,’ says Withers.
Note for Editors
Incomes Data Research (IDR) is an independent research organisation specialising in the pay and employment field.
Our research covers pay, benefits, reward practice and HR policy. We provide HR professionals with information, data and analysis to help them make intelligent reward decisions. Our offering includes our quarterly e-bulletin ‘Pay Climate’ and our online interactive tool Pay Benchmarker.
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.
For any queries relating to this research please contact Alyssa Withers (Alyssawithers@incomesdataresearch.com/01702 669549) or Katherine Heffernan (katherineheffernan@incomesdataresearch.com).