Prior to gaining my first job as a junior web developer, I often wondered how much I could expect to earn.
Whilst at university, during 2001-2005, I heard a lot about the average salary for a university graduate being around £18,000 a year (regardless of profession) – whether this was an accurate figure or not, it felt realistic and achievable to me.
Note: this post was written in 2007 and applies to salaries in the north west of England, UK. Therefore, it may not be relevant to your job search in the current year and/or outside of this geographical area.
One week after the presentation/practical demonstration which signalled the completion of my degree, I started work, as a junior web developer, for a very well established UK high street retailer, at what I considered to be a very low salary – £14,500*.
* I recognise that a lot of people in the UK earn much less than £14,500 a year and manage to support families and may consider this to be a very good salary, but I consider this to be a very poor salary for a university graduate junior web developer.
When I applied for the job**, I had no idea what the salary was and when I accepted the job, I was very disheartened to learn how low the salary was to be, but I was told that it would be increased to around £18,000 after a 3 month trial – so I took the job. However, after countless months of being told a pay rise was on the way, I was finally told one day (over a year after starting) that my salary would definitely… possibly… increase to £16,500 the following month, provided, one of the more senior members of the board agreed to that figure. That same day, I started looking for a new job.
** Technically, I didn’t actually apply for the job – but that’s another story for another day.
Note: The low salary wouldn’t have been as painful if I wasn’t spending £200 a month on petrol.
What a junior web developer will do for their salary
Lots of companies advertising for junior web developers, are looking for a bargain – essentially someone who will do a lot for as little money as possible – my first job was no different. As soon as I started it became apparent that, I was the only person in the whole organisation who understood web design/development – I was a junior with no senior/middleweight web developer above me to learn from.
My job description covered lots of areas including:
- domain names: registration/renewal
- making sure the numerous 3rd party web agencies weren’t ripping us off – they were
- fixing the mistakes of said web agencies to stop the website haemorrhaging sales
- teaching the web designer (who had no experience) how to design websites
- SEO/SEM and shopping comparison engine campaigns including meeting with 3rd parties, running campaigns myself and dealing with Google reps.
- monitoring web analytics and looking for correlations in sales patterns
- general office IT help
- and many other tasks***
*** I was also a human spellchecker for my boss.
This job was tremendous experience and had the salary been higher, I might well have stayed for longer than I did. It’s true, that although junior web developer salaries can be very low, the next job on the web development career ladder is often much better paid because of the wide ranging experience gained as a junior developer.
Getting ripped off by an employer, is an important lesson which is best learnt early on in a career. It is then out of the way and in future job interviews it becomes easier to not accept low offers and/or recognise danger signs about prospective employers.
But is such a low salary typical?
I believe that for a lot of junior web developers, that salary is, sadly, very typical – especially at web agencies. I expect this is down to 2 reasons:
- A lack of experience can prove very limiting in a job that can often demand very high levels of responsibility
- A large amount of competition for relatively few entry level positions
Due to these reasons, it can be a very high risk strategy to employ web developers with little or no experience. If a web developer has more experience, it should mean that, the web developer in question has seen and conquered more problems and consequently they can either avoid these problems completely or deal with them swiftly.
How can these low paying jobs be avoided?
The biggest warning sign, that a job will be poorly paid, will be a job description which, either has no mention of salary or describes the salary as ‘competitive‘. However, these jobs aren’t necessarily best avoided – in an industry with healthy competition for employment, bad experience can sometimes be even more valuable than good experience. Let me explain: If you work for an employer who is incompetent/uncomplimentary/generally not great and you can see their mistakes and learn from them – you will have the potential to be a much better employee/entrepreneur/person then someone who has had nothing but fantastic experiences in their career.
A friend of mine, recently found himself out of work when his employer suddenly went bust. One day, 2 weeks before payday and 4 weeks before xmas he got a phone call telling him not to bother going into work the following day. Bummer. In the short-term, this was a horrible position for my friend to be in, but, in the long-term, my friend may be quicker to notice any warning signs from an employer which may signal a similar scenario. If he chooses to start his own business, he may be more careful to avoid the traps he saw his hapless boss fall into.
What should a junior web developer be paid (in an ideal world)?
In my opinion, anything less than a salary of £16,500 for a web developer in the UK is poor, unless the employee has come straight from high school/sixth form and has no training/experience/knowledge whatsoever. Providing a person has the initiative required to perform the role of a junior web developer, then I think a figure of around £18,000 a year is fair.
If you are offered a job with a salary lower than £16,500, then I would think long and hard before accepting the offer – and decide what is right for you – it may be that you can see past the low salary in order to gain relevant experience – I certainly did.
Summary
There will be people, who started their careers as web developers at much higher salaries than I did. I’m not so foolish, as to believe that my experiences will be shared by all, but I do think that a fair number of web developers will have started on salaries which did not accurately reflect their skills and qualifications.
A great piece of advice my dad gave me, was never to tell colleagues (or even friends for that matter) how much you earn – because as soon as you do, it creates numerous emotions amongst current and ex-colleagues which are best avoided in order to stay friendly. Therefore, those hoping to learn what I currently earn, will be disappointed that I won’t be revealing my current salary nor the salary at which I left my previous job, but I do think that revealing the salary of my 1st job may be helpful to some people which is why I’ve done it.
I agree with your assessment (and would even go further and say that more around the region of £20-21,000 would be fair for a Junior Designer role). My first proper ‘web design’ job paid £14,000 too, and had gone up to about £16,000 by the time I left, I think – it’s the sort of wage you can accept if you’re single, renting, and there’s someone there that you can learn a lot from.
Matthew, I agree but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a junior web developer role advertised with a salary of £20-21k – for that matter I’ve seen lots of middleweight web developer roles advertised with salaries (a lot) less than that:(
Interesting article. It pretty much echo’s my experience so far. My first job i was on 15k which went up to 18k after 3 months.
I’m now on quite a higher wage now in a different job, although it is in the city. Living and working in the city, with the rent involved, has meant it hasn’t really been such a high pay rise as it seems!
But your point about experience is the important one here. I’m not too concerned about my salary at the moment. If you look through job sites, the salary you can earn once you have 3-5 years experience is quite considerable.
So I’m just enjoying what I’m doing, trying to make the most of my comfortable position by learning as much as I can from my more experienced colleagues.
Good luck!
I work 8 hours/day as graphic designer (web, print, identity…) and web developer in a spanish studio and i earn less than £8,000 per year (12.000€). In my first job as designer i earned £7,000 per year (9.600€). Very sad.
hellpunk, that works out at £3.85 (5.77€) an hour which is (a lot) less than a McDonalds employee would make in the UK.
As Chris implied, you need to be more specific as geographic location definitely plays a large role in salary. Are you saying UK except London? I had a friend who started w/ Logica CMG @ 21k. This was a few years ago.
To be honest though, your job description sounds more like a web administrator rather than developer. I expect developers to rip out LOC(lines of code), as well as support etc, which I didn’t see in what you said. Same friend’s first job was to build / add to web pages using dhtml, javascript, jsp’s etc. as well as connecting to database. Also was writing stored procs and dml + queries. This is what I would expect a web developer to do. FYI — I’ve been a java web developer for 10+ years
Johnny, I don’t have any experience of working in London but I would expect at the very least a London weighting of £1-3k would be applied to any salary.
The job description above, admittedly mentions a lot of the web admin type duties but there was a lot of work I did with PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, usability testing and many more duties :)
I’ve found, that web administrators actually earn more than junior web developers (with my experience being looking at job papers).
Is the salary you are talking about – with or without taxes? If it’s with taxes then I feel sorry for web developers in the UK.
I think £15K is a good starting salary for a first role in this industry for a web developer (someone who does a bit of design and has basic development skills with a language such as ASP .NET/PHP and knowledge of a RDBMS such as MSSQL/MySQL).
I started on £15K myself in a more software development based role (no design) just over 2 years ago after finishing my degree (Comp Science). I just took the job as a means to an end. It’s hard getting a foot on the ladder.
I have friends who have been in the same position as yourself with regards to a promised salary increase. Unfortunately, I don’t think these empty promises are unique to the IT sector.
In my opinion, salary should be assessed using a combination of proven technical competence/ability, and solid work experience.
Regarding comments made by phil on McDonalds wages, i have just left working there at the age of nearly 17 and the wage is exactly 3.85 an hour. However goes up to just over £5.00 after the age of 18. So basicly your on the earnings of a 16-17 year old at McDonalds in the UK on that wage.
Al: yes the salary is with tax included, take home pay would be roughly 30% less than that figure.
Rob: I agree how difficult it is to get your foot on the ladder.
Good article. It suppose it varies a hell of a lot geographically.
My first offer when I left university was with a design agency in London (I live in Scotland) – surprisingly I was offered 22k to start on. I had no actual working experience at the time so god knows how they came up with that figure – I did however refused the job for another job based in Scotland for a bit less pay.
I work for a french company in Paris which has outsourced all their web development department in in my country, Mauritius.
My boss earn lot of money over my team. I’m the best paid guy in my Linkeo Mauritius and I only earn around 3000 pound a year. Who do you think should complain you or me?
Shane: How does your salary compare to other people you know in Mauritius?
I do not know what the average cost to buy a house in Mauritius is, but in the UK it is over £200,000. Hopefully, you can see why a salary less than £15,000 in the UK works out quite low.
I can only presume the cost of living in Mauritius is lower than in the UK, but please correct me if I am wrong.
not telling other people your wages is silly theres nothing to hide…
im currently going for a promotion at my work (junior to middleweight web designer) and i have asked people above me what their salary is so i can negotiate a higher pay but noone wants to tell me why not:S
Whats there to hide? nothing friendly about it!!!
I think you need to be more aggressive in setting your salary. My first job in central London, as web developer/sysadmin, after leaving uni was paid £25k. After 8 months I left, to work at another startup.
I kept saying to myself; ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’. I asked for between 35k and 40k, and was paid 37.5k.
This was in 1998/99.
Will, you are right. You do have to be more confident in interviews, when the question is asked – ‘how much are you looking to earn’?
For my first job, I just wanted the job – I didn’t know I could haggle.
I started out on a salary of £13,500 at a local council as an intern(work placement) for a year and 3 months during my degree. This was one of the highest paying placements the university had on offer. The others were about 10k.
I think geographical location is important in the uk for web developers salarys. I’m based in the north east which is quite deprived when compared to the south east (London) therefore the wages are a lot lower.
Your first job should be about what you learn more than anything else and you shouldnt really stay there for more than 1.5 year unless you are promoted.
i started out on £24,000 (in london) as a ‘standard’ developer although doing a lot of other work. that was 2 years ago. i was fresh out of uni although i had already built up a fairly healthy portfolio so could thankfully skip over the junior role.
now im looking towards a new job with a salary of around 27-30k, which doesnt seem to bad for the industry (in london anyway), at least not from scanning monster.co.uk.
if i wasnt living in london i’d imagine a starting salary now-a-days of around 19-21k for a junior dev.
Hi there, reading all your comments were very interesting. I am just an average graphic designer, not even a web developer. My first job started at 14k, but got slowly bumped up too 16k after a lot of pushing. I left the company in the end and now just started a better job in the city. Currently earning £17.5k and I know the company earns about 1.3 million a year, so they can definitely afford to give me a rise especially as there is no “junior” rate we charge.
I have just finished my 3 month “trial period” and they are more than happy with my performance.
Does anyone have any idea, what is a reasonable increase after a 3 month trial period? I have been working for about 13 months after uni? I will be having a review hopefully sometime this week, I am hoping to push for as much as possible, but I am not entirely sure what’s a reasonable salary.
Any help and advice would be great
I thoroughly understand the concerns about the low wage of £14,500 but surely you should see yourself been lucky to even get that job! I’ve been looking for 3 months now for a junior web development job, and it’s becoming impossible to find one at 10k. Well I’ve given up on looking now, and have been doing freelance work, which is good, but I’d rather work for a company. I’d even resigned from my previous management job within retail (£22k) to get into the web industry. It’s just sooo competitive! I’d personally work for £12k, well i’d even work for less just to get the work experience
Damon I do feel lucky to have got *that* job but, it I also know what values I can bring to an organisation.
You shouldn’t sell yourself short – you just need to get your foot in the door.
Thanks for this, I was just googling to see what kind of salaries people get fresh out of uni as I finish in a few months and both me and the other half will be going into this kind of work. Good to hear someone else’s experience :)
i am just about to finish my course on web development and it is always interesting to see other peoples views on what we, juniors, should earn. The amount of effort i have put into my course i would love around £25,000. I guess i will just have to wait and see.
Rachel, I think your expectations are very optimistic. With 3 years experience I still don’t earn that much money.
Good luck, I hope you get what you want.
Well, as someone who has recently gone from being an employee to employer, £18,000 for a junior with no actual real world work experience is pretty damn good in my eyes. Being a junior means you make mistakes which have to be picked up before clients see them, the amount of mistakes a junior can make is incredible and a salary of £18,000 can quickly seem too much to pay for someone who is still learning their trade.
That said , i do remember working for a company and thinking that i was worth more than i was actually being paid (hence why i’ve started my own business) but equally there were people there complaining of a poor wage when the standard and quality of their work was below par yet they couldn’t see it and thought that just having the word “designer” in their job title entitled them to a big salary.
I don’t believe that degree students should automatically assume higher pay because they have a degree because in real world production terms you’re not going to be as efficient as someone with even 1yrs experience. Get your foot in the door, learn from your peers, get a year or twos experience behind you then assess your value from an employers point of view – are you making them money? Simple as that, if not then don’t even bother asking for a rise, its not happening. If on the other hand you are productive, and you do make the company money then I am fully supportive of being paid the going rate and employees who short change good workers are only shooting themselves in the foot in the long run.
Sambo… spot on. For me, a junior should be getting around 15K give or take. They are just starting out in the industry and regardless of qualifications know nothing about the real world. A junior should be thankful for getting their foot in the door firstly, then being able to learn and develop should be the next step. Money should be the last thing on their minds. If they are good, the money will come. Junior’s, remember this… “You have to EARN your stripes”.
So timely that I have come across this just as I’m coming out of my degree in web design/development.
I have to say that I would NOT accept any job at 14,000 – 17,000 pounds. I was earning 12,000 in my placement year alone. I understand that graduates need to prove themselves but paying someone £14,000 is in my opinion not valuing the amount of work and intelligence they have already demonstrated by achieving a 1st or 2.1 in their degree.
Also people are not all equal when it comes to how they well they can handle themselves in the workplace etc and how much attention they pay to the quality of their work.
The jobs I have been looking at have been going for around £23,000+ and I would accept anything around 20,000. AND I WOULD WORK FOR IT.
I think the obvious point here is that not all graduates going for a career in Web Development will be equal. All people have character traits which will raise or lower the amount they can hope to earn based on I know developers new to full-time employment who have years of experience in working in a hobbyist/part-time capacity who I’d much rather work with over people with a 2.1 Computing degree but with no evidence of attempting to engage in the field outside of their course. Passion for a field is hugely important, and if you can convey that passion — without sounding like a complete geek — then employers should be more than willing to raise the salary offer. Either way the basic ‘new hire’ should be able to knock up a simple XHTML/CSS site, and know the basics of one of Flash/Javascript/Design.
That’s not to say that a degree isn’t a good indicator of basic worth. At the very least you hopefully have a couple of years of tedious lectures stored in your brain. People with a 2.1 degree probably have a good work ethic (i.e. they can work on their own steam) or they will be capable of producing goods in short timeframes (the 2 days before a deadline), and either way they can be useful traits. People with a first class degree probably have both, and theyre all quantifiable eventually.
Depending on where you are working, theres also the issue of speed of delivery. I’ve seen developers with otherwise equal skillsets, one of whom will take a week to deliver a task and the other will take a day. Its fairly obvious that the latter will be the one worth a higher salary premium. Remember also that different companies will have different expectations on what a junior is expected to do, and to what level.
(No relation to the Chris James from a previous comment!)
As I am adding a comment late I don’t really expect many to see it. However, my first job as a web designer out of University was for $45000 in 1998. I should mention I live in the U.S. in Missouri (the middle of the country, called the plains states or midwest depending). I felt that was acceptable. Today I would expect $60,000 for a middle to senior web design position at a reputable company. That would translate to approximately 30,378.12 GBP. Of course I have to pay for my health care…but that’s another story isn’t it?
Hi. Great to see a baseline and comparison of what junior web devs should be earning.
I am living in the North East of UK. I have just recently finished my degree 2 weeks ago. My course was Business IT and the only web dev content was a core, year long module. This was learning XHMTL, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MYSQL Database.
I successfully passed an interview 1 week before my degree finished for a ‘front and back end web developer’ position. The advertised salary was 16k – 25k.
They gave me a 1 week trial at the pay of 15k. Having passed the trial and reflecting back I had no knowledge or experience of the following new skills picked up:
Drupal & PHP
JQuery (JScript library)
Python & Django
They have now said that I would be getting a salary of 14k. The reason given was a lot of hand-holding and seen as more of a trainee programmer. However, I was noticed for being hardworking, able to learn fast and after 18 months the pay could rise by 5k if I was really good.
How do you guys and gals see this? They also said that the starting salary was reflected by me not staying for too long. I was thinking maybe naively I was gonna be with the agency for the long term in my career. How long should I ideally stay?
Thanks in advance for any comments.
@Dave: Unfortunately, a lot of the content provided by web development courses at university are not very useful for commercial work hence why this agency felt they had to do a lot of ‘hand-holding’ with you.
My experience, is this: Your salary will only increase by a few percent with your current employer so the chances of your boss upping your salary by £5k within 18 months is very slim – your employer may be different. However, if at 12-18 months you leave for another agency you will probably command a higher salary than you are earning now.
Get yourself a blog and start blogging about your progress learning those skills you are picking up and within time other web agencies in your area will start to notice you.
Thanks Phil. I will definitely take that sound advice on board. This site is certainly very useful to receive guidance from experienced practitioners such as yourself.
@Dave: Unfortunately it seems that advertising a job with a wide range (16-25k), offering a trial at below that rate and a final salary even lower is a common occurrence. At the same time, as an employer I know that it’s tough to find decent candidates.
I run a *small* web development agency and have done for the best part of 10 years since leaving university and there are two ongoing issues for every similar company:
1) Lack of good clients – the kind that allow small companies to grow and pay reasonable market rates for designers and developers – the answer to this one is just to keep looking!
2) Lack of good candidates – I really don’t come across many people at all who have a good knowledge across a wide range of skills who aren’t already in good jobs or wealthy freelancers(!). You don’t have to be a world class expert in any of these areas but if you have a reasonable command of the key web skills you will always be in demand both as a freelancer and an employee. For example good knowledge of XHTML/CSS, at least one javascript library and a reasonable understanding of how to use some of the most obvious open source publishing platforms would be a good place to start.
Finally, as Phil says, get yourself a blog. This site is a great example of self-promotion – well designed, plenty of content that indicates a wide range of understanding of many different areas of web development – not a bad example to follow.
In my first software development job out of uni I was paid about £28K. (I graduated in 2001 with a Maths degree). This was in London, but I’ve moved around a bit since and it headed up towards about £40K. I’m now self-employed so I don’t have a fixed salary.
In my opinion, £14K is a bit of an insult to an intelligent, skilled developer (even with little/no experience). Companies will get what they pay for, and if they only offer low salaries, they wont attract the best candidates.
btw, I don’t see what the point of not divulging your salary to your peers – unless we discuss it, how will we know if we’re getting a fair deal as developers?
@Ric: I’m in favour of all jobs having a clear salary structure so everyone knows the core in terms of what they are paid – what they will be paid when they reach the next level but if that isn’t the case, it is often wise to not divulge your salary to co-workers. They may be doing an identical job to you and be earning less and get secretly very annoyed with you or they may be doing a different job and being paid less and not understand how important your job is and why it pays more.
The only people who should know your salary are the person who’s hiring you, and your mum! It’s tempting to tell people what you earn, but if you do you’re really only doing yourself out of a wage rise (and giving someone else ammunition to get theirs).
A canny person should know what they’re worth and try to exceed that target.
As for Junior (as in Junior straight out of Uni), anything goes. I wouldn’t pay less than 18k, but I’m in London, and that’s probably comparative to 14 or 15 up north, maybe even less.
Lets face it, the market for Juniors is saturated, 10-a-penny. As an employer it’s hard to find a good one, but if I just wanted someone and had time to train them then i’d pay BOTTOM dollar for them, purely because they’re everywhere.
It’s up to the Junior to prove their worth that little bit more, and the only way to do that is bend over backwards once ‘you’re in’ and show that you’re better than your (probably irrelevant, no matter what your university says) degree.
It seems we have a similar situation in Canada. I currently make $35,000 a year which is on the lower end of average for just starting out. One great thing about where I work is that they totatlly support you. I have a budget for training, computers, extra stuff (my new wacom tablet), software. As I am in house they also realize that I don’t really have another web designer to learn from so expect me to use our Lynda.co membership and to read blogs and use some social network sites (twitter) sparingly during work. They have said that if I am not feeling a project that minute and want to run a tutorial, tweet… that is fine as long as the project is done on time. So at least where I am they treat me like gold, this is also echoed for our print designer and audio production person.
@curtismchale: Good to hear your employer is supporting you. I can’t think of another way to get the best from an employee.
Nice site, Phil :) I agree with Ric, companies to try and take full advantage of the lacking experience developer, making sure to let you know that they’re the ones doing you a “favor”, when in actual fact, they need your skills to meet the overly expected demands they just promised to their clients. The experienced developer would soon know that this is due to bad account management!
To be bluntly honest £14k is absurd, with living expenses going through the roof, and studying a BSc degree in Computing, and obtaining a few MCPs on the way, only to be told that your worth less than a Sainsbury’s trolley boy would make me stand up, and leave the interview mid way through process.
Before I started my course, I had a figure in mind of the salary I expected, which was £20k – £25k, and when I left, I didn’t even look at jobs offering less than £20k, even with debt mounting from student loans and credit cards. The main problem is confidence in ability, as no one knows it all, and since we tend to just get on with our work, we don’t often socialise about these things. Where a business candidate would know exactly what they are looking for, and what they need to get it, we tend not to play our hand, fearing that we may have our bluff called on not knowing how to code embedded javascript via depreciated c# coding, or how to declare a cursor in a stored procedure (which are arbitrary practices, but we still worry about it!).
In my opinion, if your employer starts off in undervaluing from the get go, don’t be surprised your getting a low pay packet.
Never be shy to negotiate your salary upwards at job interview. If your gut feel is that the salary is too low then if you can’t get the uplift you want, you are probably looking at the wrong job.
I am coming from a different angle. I left school after doing Chemistry, Physics and Biology at A Level. I work in IT support and have been running my own company doing web design and development for over 3 years. I am now looking for a stable salary (clients tend to be a pain in the ass to get money out of) and am having to look at junior level jobs. I would take 20k and if offered less would need to work from home as petrol is just plain stupid!
Interview today :)
I loved reading this article and some of your other posts it’s really helpful to see someone else who’s been through this kind of experience and shared it with everyone.
And I imagine after 5 years now the average is probably about £20k now for a junior web developer.
Nice read, cheers Phil!
This is a brilliant article. I have come back to it a couple of times over the last year. First time I fell upon it, I was just about to graduate from Uni from doing an Interactive Media course. I was looking for jobs and had an offer from a local respected agency to be a Junior FE Developer. The Job was to do HTML and CSS for about £12k in a 10 month contract. I thought that this was ridiculously low considering I had just put myself in £25k debt for 3 years of university yet I could be paid more working at retail. However as I kept thinking that it was a job and I needed one ASAP. After long discussion and research (including this article), I turned down the offer and kept looking.
1 month after turning down the job, I got a job as a Junior Web Developer in the city for a respected creative agency. My salary is £22k and instead of doing just HTML and CSS, my bosses were keen to see what I could do and have thrown at me all kinds of challenges/responsibilities that the smaller agency could probably never afford to risk. My peers at uni also all got jobs at around £20k by looking in the city.
I just thought I would add to the mix, I am an Apprentice Web Developer who works 60+ hours a week as the sole developer in a Creative Agency.
I am solely responsible for the 40+ websites that we maintain and I am solely responsible for the development of all new projects that we take on.
I have self-taught myself everything that I know and have become very competent with WordPress, HTML5 and CSS3.
And what do I get for all of this responsibility? £3.00 per hour!