As a single person living in London, I suffer from the ‘single person tax‘ and I don’t think we talk about that enough in relation to design salaries. Let’s assume a junior designer role pays £35K (which incidentally is below the Skilled Worker Visa requirement).
- That’s £2,355.92 after tax.
- In Zone 3 where I live, the median 1 bedroom flat will cost you £1700 in rent according to the London Rents Map.
- To commute into Zone 1 for work will set you back £192.80 a month
- Buying a lunch every day at work will cost you £5-£10 per meal (thank god Pret lowered their prices again) which means around £150 a month
- A monthly food shop will cost you £224.15 according to the Food Foundation
- Which leaves £128.97 to cover council tax, energy bills, internet, mobile phone bills, and everything else.
So this really only works out if you never come into the office, live in a flatshare, are in a relationship where you both work, have wealthy parents who support you, take a second job , or sell pictures of your feet on the internet. I don’t think that describes a very manageable or equitable situation. Lower salaries make it impossible for someone who is either a carer, raising a child on their own, living alone to take up a career in design later in life. It also leads to less engagement and less patience around promotions and higher industry churn which affects corporate institutional memory.
If I campaigned for MP on a single issue, I’d love to see the UK’s design industry stop offering jobs with salaries less than the median salary of 30 year olds in London (£46,954) and have wage ratio transparency on job sites. We need to offer more people more opportunities to join us in design, not less.