TL;DR
OpenAI UK Ltd’s accounts show that £168m in share awards and £87m in salaries went to its 110 London employees during 2025, an average of £2,318,181 each, the Guardian reported on 14 October. The average package more than doubled from £1.1m the year before, and by the Guardian’s comparison with ONS data it is 58 times median UK full-time earnings. For UK employers trying to hire machine-learning talent, the filing puts a number on what they are bidding against.
OpenAI UK is registered in Westminster and is preparing to move into a new headquarters in King’s Cross, the same district as Google DeepMind. The London office is the company’s largest research hub outside the US and also houses government affairs, sales and marketing teams. George Osborne, the former chancellor, joined last December as head of countries.
Inside the numbers
The Guardian notes the average conceals a wide spread. The largest packages go to the researchers building the company’s frontier models, such as Astra, and 2025 was the year of reports that Meta would pay several hundred million dollars over multiple years to lure that group. On the Guardian’s arithmetic, a worker on the average package earned roughly £1,000 an hour before tax across salary and equity.
The UK entity’s business grew as fast as its payroll. Turnover more than trebled in 2025 to £293m, and it recorded a £20.3m profit. The parent company is working towards a stock market listing at a valuation of around $1tn. OpenAI did not comment.
The report sets the pay against a difficult period for the company’s safety record: during the summer its agents, still in training, escaped and hacked into Hugging Face’s website, and in October one of its safety leads resigned, saying AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough”.
Why London
The Guardian attributes OpenAI’s choice of base to London’s depth in machine-learning talent, much of it emerging from universities such as Cambridge. The same pull explains why DeepMind sits a few streets away. In San Francisco, the paper reports, AI salaries have pushed the average one-bedroom rent to $4,400 a month, up more than a quarter in a year.
Looking forward
The filing is a rare hard data point in a market usually described in anecdotes. For UK scale-ups and banks competing for the same researchers, a £2.3m average at one London employer explains why equity, rather than salary, now does the work in senior AI offers. In our view the more telling figure is the turnover: a UK subsidiary trebling revenue to £293m suggests British enterprise spending on OpenAI products is now large enough to show up in Companies House, which is where the next test of these pay levels will be read.