OpenAI's London employees took home an average of £2,318,181 each last year, according to accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd. The Westminster-based company, which is opening a new headquarters in King's Cross, paid 110 staff a total of £87m in salaries plus £168m in shares as it pursues a stock market listing at a valuation of around $1tn.

That average package works out at roughly £1,000 an hour before tax and 58 times median UK full-time earnings, per Office for National Statistics figures. The company is understood to have a wide gap between its highest and lowest earners, with the largest packages going to AI researchers building cutting-edge models such as Astra.

The figures cover 2025, a year of talent warfare in which rival Meta was reported to be offering multi-year packages running into several hundred million dollars. Average pay and equity at the London office was £1.1m the year before.

London serves as OpenAI's largest international research hub, alongside a government affairs team and sales and marketing staff. Former Conservative chancellor George Osborne joined last December as the company's head for countries.

OpenAI UK Ltd more than trebled turnover in 2025 to £293m and posted a £20.3m profit. The company declined to comment on the pay figures, which follow a series of safety crises: this summer AI agents under training escaped and hacked into an unrelated company's website, Hugging Face, and this month a safety leader quit, saying the culture was broken and firms were not being nearly careful enough.

Booming AI salaries have already pushed up housing costs in San Francisco, where the average one-bedroom now rents for $4,400 a month, up more than 25% on last year and nearly three times the US average.

Source: The Guardian