Sources, rules and limitations

Maximum budgeted salary per role, as briefed by the client. Not the transacted salary.

The survey covers six core engineering disciplines, drawn from the last couple of years of briefing data. This edition doesn't break the dataset down beyond those six - scale of the underlying dataset is stated once, on the main survey page, not repeated or broken down here. The dataset is pre-aggregated and PII-stripped before it ever reaches this site: no client name, contact, or identifying detail from the underlying job-order export appears anywhere on the survey, and the raw export itself is never ingested or stored here.

The “Engineering & Technical Leadership” discipline is labelled “Management” in the underlying dataset; it was renamed for publication as a clearer public-facing label and to match the site's existing Engineering & Technical Leadership discipline page.

National figures from ASHE Table 14 (occupation by 4-digit SOC); regional figures from ASHE Table 15 (region by 4-digit SOC).

Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0 (full licence text). Attribution:

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

ASHE moved to SOC 2020 coding in the 2021 edition; 2023-onward figures are not directly comparable to 2022 and earlier.

From gov.uk, Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Occupations and Appendix Skilled Worker: published, legally binding minimum salaries by SOC code, as currently in force. This is a legal floor, not a survey: a client whose budget sits below it cannot sponsor that role at all. Immigration rules change periodically - always confirm the current going rate directly against gov.uk before relying on it for a live sponsorship decision.

It is also not an independent measurement. Home Office going rates are set as a percentile of the same ONS ASHE full-time earnings distribution shown in section 2, for the matching 4-digit SOC code - not a separately-surveyed figure. That is why, discipline by discipline, the going rate tends to sit close to the ONS median rather than diverging from it: one is derived from the other. Published sources aren't fully consistent on the exact percentile used - some describe the 25th percentile for experienced workers, others state a move to median earnings following a more recent rule change. Rather than assert a specific percentile we can't confirm from the current gov.uk technical note, this page describes it only as “a percentile of the ASHE distribution, set by the Home Office” - see the source directly for the exact current methodology.

Licence: Open Government Licence v3.0. Attribution:

Source: Home Office, gov.uk, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

A past rule change removed most RQF 3-5 occupations (including 3113 Engineering technicians) from new Skilled Worker sponsorship; they remain listed only for extending permission already granted before that change.

Source: gov.uk, Immigration Rules Appendix Skilled Occupations

185 rows were dropped from the raw job-order export before aggregation, for the reasons below. Per-rule counts aren't published in this edition of the dataset; the total is the figure available.

• Permanent roles only

  Contract and interim job orders are handled separately and excluded here; only permanent-role briefs are counted.

• Must carry a maximum budget

  A job order with no maximum salary recorded against it cannot be aggregated.

• GBP, UK roles only

  Roles priced in another currency or based outside the UK (identified via country/state fields) are excluded as not comparable.

• No usable discipline category

  A row with no sub-category recorded cannot be assigned to a discipline.

• Outside the date window

  Roles created before the survey's start date are excluded (an earlier partial period was too small to be representative).

ASHE has used SOC 2020 codes since its 2021 edition. This matters because SOC 2020 renumbered several occupations from SOC 2010: under SOC 2010, code 2126 was “Design and development engineers.” Under SOC 2020, 2126 is Aerospace engineers, an entirely different occupation. Pulling 2126 expecting design engineers would silently return the wrong figures throughout this survey, so it is never used here.

• The survey covers six core engineering disciplines, not the full breadth of Verso's business.
• The sample reflects Verso's own client base, not the UK engineering market as a whole.
• That client base is skewed toward electronics and defence employers.
• Figures carry no company-size adjustment: a five-person startup and a multinational sit in the same band.
• Figures carry no seniority split: a graduate hire and a principal engineer in the same discipline sit in the same band.
• Verso's figure is the briefed maximum, not a transacted salary.
• The Home Office sponsorship floor is derived from the same ONS distribution shown alongside it, not an independent measurement - see section 3.

Verso Recruitment Group. (n.d.). Verso UK Engineering Salary Survey. https://www.versorecruitment.com/salary-survey

If citing the ONS or Home Office figures specifically, use the attribution wording in the relevant section above rather than this citation, per each source's own licence.

For questions about this survey's methodology or data, info@versorecruitment.com.