Author:Lucien Krogel·Founder & CEO
According to Glassdoor's 2025 pay sentiment data, 62% of UK professionals feel underpaid. Most of them will do nothing about it. Not because they lack ambition, but because they lack proof.
The feeling of being underpaid is common. A defensible case for why you deserve more is rare. And that gap, between suspicion and evidence, is exactly where most salary conversations fall apart before they even start.
The standard advice is to "check Glassdoor and ask for more." That approach has two problems. First, a single salary source is noisy. Title, scope, sector, and geography all distort the comparison. Second, it skips the harder work: defining what your role actually is before you benchmark it.
The useful question is not "am I underpaid?" It is: does my current pay sit inside or outside a credible market range for the role I actually do?
This article gives you a step-by-step method to answer that question before your next pay review.
Salary data is only as useful as the comparison it supports. Before you open a single salary guide, you need a clear, honest description of the role you perform today, because the title on your contract is often a poor proxy for the work you actually do.
This matters more than most people realise. A "Project Manager" at one company might own a £2m programme with three direct reports and cross-functional stakeholder management. At another, the same title might mean coordinating a single workstream with no budget ownership. Arius Recruit's 2026 customer success salary analysis makes the same point for CS roles: compensation shifts materially with commercial ownership, account complexity, and strategic responsibility. The title tells you almost nothing on its own.
Work through the following variables and write them down. This becomes the foundation for every salary comparison you make.
Once you have this written down, you can compare your role against salary data at the right level, not just the right title.
No single salary source is reliable enough to base a negotiation on. Each one has a different methodology, a different sample, and a different bias. The goal is triangulation: use at least three source types and look for where the ranges overlap.
The table below covers the strongest sources for GTM, operations, project management, support, and customer success roles in the UK. Use the "best use" column to decide which to prioritise for your situation.
| Source | Type | Strength | Weakness | Best use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hays UK Salary Guide | Recruiter guide | Role and regional breakdowns, updated annually | Based on recruiter placements, skews to active candidates | Cross-checking ranges by function and UK region |
| Reed Salary Guides 2026 | Job-posting dataset | Built from 18 million UK job postings; reflects live hiring market | Posting data can include outliers and inflated listings | Grounding your range in what employers are actually advertising |
| Robert Walters UK Salary Survey 2026 | Recruiter placement data | Based on 100,000+ UK placements; includes hiring context | Skews towards professional and financial services sectors | Validating ranges with real placement data |
| Robert Half Salary Guide | Matched compensation data | Uses actual matched placement data plus validated job postings | Less granular for some niche functions | Verifying that your range reflects real offers, not just listings |
| Michael Page Salary Guide | Recruiter guide | Strong for operations, PM, and support roles | Broad coverage means some roles are less detailed | PM and operations role benchmarking |
| Arius Recruit / Digital Waffle | Specialist recruiter | Detailed customer success and GTM salary data for the UK | Narrower sample than major guides | Customer success and GTM-specific benchmarking |
Start with two or three of the major guides (Hays, Reed, Robert Walters) to establish a broad range for your role and region. Then cross-check with a function-specific source that matches your role cluster more precisely.
Robert Half's methodology guidance is worth noting here: they advocate using matched compensation data plus validated posting data over anecdotal sources. That means you should weight sources with clear methodology more heavily than user-submitted platforms or informal salary-sharing threads, which can be noisy and unrepresentative.
Look for the following in every source you use:
Raw salary ranges from guides are starting points, not conclusions. Before you can use them, you need to adjust for three variables that can move your realistic market value by 10-25%: geography, company context, and total compensation.
1. Adjust for geography
London salaries typically sit 15-25% above equivalent roles in major regional cities such as Manchester, Bristol, or Edinburgh. Remote-first roles often benchmark between London and regional rates depending on the employer's location and pay philosophy. If a salary guide does not specify region, check whether it has a London weighting or a national average, and adjust accordingly.
2. Adjust for company context
Company size, funding stage, and sector all affect what employers pay, particularly for GTM and customer-facing roles where variable pay structures differ significantly.
3. Adjust for total compensation, not just base salary
This is where most people undercount their market value or overcount it. Ravio's 2026 compensation trends report is clear: benchmark total compensation, not just base salary, especially for roles with bonuses, commission, or equity.
When you compare your package against a market range, compare like-for-like. A £70,000 base with a 20% bonus and 5% employer pension contribution is a materially different package from a £75,000 base with no bonus and statutory pension.
Once you have data from multiple sources and have made the relevant adjustments, the next step is synthesis. The goal is a three-point range: a lower bound, a midpoint, and a stretch target. That range becomes your negotiation anchor.
Do not average all the numbers you have collected. That approach blends incompatible comparisons and produces a meaningless midpoint. Instead, weight your sources by how closely they match your actual situation.
Resulting fair-pay range: £55,000 (lower bound) / £63,000 (midpoint) / £72,000 (stretch)
If your current salary is below the lower bound, you have a strong correction case grounded in market data. If it sits near the midpoint, the strength of your case depends more on demonstrable business impact and career progression. If it is above the midpoint but below the stretch, you are in the market but have room to argue for recognition of broader scope.
The same logic applies across roles. UK project managers are typically cited in the £55,000-£75,000 range by Michael Page and Robert Walters, with senior or programme-level roles sitting above that band.
Market data gets your employer's attention. Business impact closes the gap. A salary review request grounded in both is significantly harder to dismiss than one based on either alone.
PM Training's salary negotiation guidance puts it plainly: "Employers respond to value, not personal need, and results-based evidence strengthens the case." That means the strongest framing is not "I need more money" or "the cost of living has gone up." It is: "My current pay is below market for the level of contribution and responsibility I carry."
Translate your work into the metrics your employer cares about. The specific categories will vary by role, but the principle is consistent: show commercial or operational impact, not just activity.
The goal is to connect your market data to your specific contribution. A UK project manager might say:
"I've benchmarked UK salaries for project managers at my level, and I'd like my package to reflect where the market is in 2025-2026. Based on the scope I carry and the outcomes I've delivered, I believe a salary of [X] is well-supported by the data."A customer success manager might frame it as:
"Rather than focusing on personal need, I'd like to ground this in the business impact I've delivered: revenue retention, account expansion, and client satisfaction. The market data supports a meaningful adjustment."
The most effective salary negotiations combine three things: a credible market range, a clear account of business impact, and a specific number. Expert consensus across multiple sources suggests that evidence-led, well-timed requests typically result in increases of 5-15%.
Even professionals who do the work often undermine it with avoidable errors. Ravio's 2026 compensation trends data shows that employers are scrutinising the basis of pay increase requests more carefully as raise eligibility tightens. A weak benchmark gives them an easy reason to push back.
Watch out for these:
You do not need perfect certainty before you negotiate. You need a credible range, a clear evidence pack, and a rationale tied to business value rather than personal need.
The method in this article is repeatable. Use it before every pay review, not just this one.
The professionals who walk into pay reviews with proof, a number, and a business case are the ones who come out with meaningful increases. Built on methodology from 300+ career coaching engagements that generated over £1.3 million in salary raises, Ask Tua is designed to help you build exactly that kind of case.
If you want support structuring your job search or compensation strategy, join the Ask Tua waitlist for early access when we launch.
Use at least three. A recruiter guide, a job-posting dataset, and a second UK-specific source give you a much safer range than one headline number. The goal is overlap, not the highest figure you can find.
Compare your actual responsibilities. Titles are often too broad to be useful, especially across project management, operations, support, and customer success. Scope, ownership, and seniority matter more than the label on your contract.
Yes. Total compensation matters, especially in roles with bonus, commission, or equity. A lower base can still be competitive if the rest of the package is strong, so compare the full offer like-for-like.
Shift the conversation to total compensation. If base flexibility is genuinely limited, negotiate on bonus structure, pension contribution, additional leave, or a defined review date with a committed uplift. Ravio's 2026 data confirms employers are reserving above-market increases for high-impact contributors, so tying your ask to specific outcomes strengthens your position even in constrained environments.
No. Glassdoor is useful as a directional check, but it is not strong enough on its own. Weight it below recruiter guides and validated UK salary data, and use it only as one input in a wider comparison.
Negotiate the whole package. Base salary is the most visible number, but total compensation is what determines your actual financial position. If base is constrained, bonuses, pension, equity, and benefits are all legitimate levers.
About the Author
Lucien Krogel
Founder & CEO
Lucien founded Ask Tua. He spent six years coaching people through their job searches and kept seeing the same thing: strong candidates firing out CVs and hearing nothing, with no idea which fix would have changed it. Not a talent problem, a blindness problem. He built Ask Tua to turn the lights on, so you stop guessing from your first application.
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