Business and project management
Chief executive jobs
Running the whole organisation and answering to a board or owners for what it does.
£99,944 median full-time pay, UK, ONS 2025
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Chief executive jobs across the UK
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Chief executive jobs across the UK: be first to hear
Tell us this is the work you want and where you would travel to. The day an employer advertises it, you get one email with a link to the advert. You read it and decide. Free, no account to manage, and one click stops it.
Open adverts for Chief executive jobs across the UK, as a plain list
Published pay
What chief executive jobs pay
Median full-time pay for chief executives and senior officials was £99,944 across the UK in 2025. Full-time work of every kind had a median of £39,039, so this occupation sits about 2.6 times that. It is a median, so half of those jobs paid less, and it describes the occupation nationally rather than any advert on this page.
That figure is the reason this role is on the board. Every role here has a published ONS median full-time salary at or above £50,000, and it is checked against the ONS table each time the site is built rather than asserted in the copy. A role that stopped clearing it would stop the build.
What the local data covers
Adding up the published local figures across the 175 areas with data gives 129,336 people in work in this occupation group at the 2021 census. The middle area records 384. That is arithmetic over local releases, not a national statistic, and areas the publisher withholds are simply absent from it.
The largest are Surrey at 6,218, Hertfordshire at 4,061, Westminster at 3,701, Kent at 3,594, Hampshire at 3,579. Coverage runs across 10 regions of England and Wales.
Census counts follow where people live, not where the jobs are, and they are not a count of vacancies. The business survey figures on each area page count employee jobs located in that area in 2024, which is a different population again. Neither is ever divided by the other.
Chief executive: the full picture
Why you rarely see these advertised
Most chief executive appointments are made through executive search, through a board's own network, or by promoting somebody already there. Open advertising is more common in the public sector, in charities and in housing associations, where an open process is expected or required.
If a chief executive role is advertised openly, read carefully what scale it actually describes. The title covers organisations of ten people and of ten thousand.
What the numbers on this site can and cannot tell you
ONS publishes a median salary for chief executives and senior officials, and it is the highest median of any occupation it measures. It is also an average across every organisation size, sector and ownership model there is, which makes it a poor guide to any individual appointment.
The census count on a local page tells you how many people in an area hold senior director roles. It is a reasonable signal of where head offices are and no signal at all of where a vacancy is.
Before you apply
- A senior leadership career, usually with profit and loss responsibility at scale
- Right to work in the UK
Chief executive jobs: common questions
Does chief executive work pay more than £50,000 a year?
On the national figures, yes, and that is why the role is on this board at all. Median full-time pay for chief executives and senior officials was £99,944 across the UK in 2025, against £39,039 for full-time work of every kind. It is a median, so half of those jobs paid less, and it says nothing about what any individual advert pays.
What qualifications do I need to work as a chief executive?
A senior leadership career, usually with profit and loss responsibility at scale. Right to work in the UK.
Where does AboveMedian have local figures for chief executive jobs?
In 175 county and unitary areas across England and Wales, from the 2021 census. Scotland ran a separate census in 2022 through National Records of Scotland which is not published in the same place, so Scottish areas have no local figure. Adverts themselves are UK wide.
Do you decide who gets sent to an employer?
No. You read the adverts, you choose one, and you apply to that employer yourself. Nothing on this site forwards a person to a job they did not apply to, and no employer is given a list of people.
What does it cost to use?
Nothing, ever. It is always free for job seekers, and employers pay to advertise. There is no premium account, no paid profile and no fee of any kind on the job seeker side.