OpenAI London Office Reports Average Annual Salary Over £2.3 Million

According to an IT之家 report on October 15, 2026, citing The Guardian, OpenAI's London office paid an average of £2,318,181 per employee in 2025 across a staff of 110. That figure, which the report says includes salary and equity, is 58 times the median pay of full-time employees in the UK, a comparison attributed to the Office for National Statistics.

The report states that OpenAI UK Limited is registered in Westminster, with its new headquarters located in King's Cross, London. Company filings cited in the report show that the 110 employees received a combined £87 million in salary, plus company equity worth £168 million. On the report's own conversion, an employee receiving the average package would earn roughly £1,000 per hour before tax, counting salary and equity together.

The same report notes wide internal pay gaps, with the highest packages reserved for AI researchers, who it says built frontier models such as Astra at the San Francisco-based company. The figures cover 2025, a period the report describes as a peak in the industry's talent war, when rival Meta was said to be offering multi-year packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The report also mentions that OpenAI is targeting an IPO valuation of about $1 trillion. All of these details come from this single report; beyond The Guardian and the Office for National Statistics, the material contains no other source responding to or adding to the numbers.