The minimum wage rose 114% since 2010. Your pay didn't. The NMW ate your pay rise. Enter your job and see the evidence.
The NMW ate your pay rise. Since 2010, governments have hiked the minimum wage 114% — from £5.93 to £12.71. Sounds generous. But the money had to come from somewhere. Employers didn't magically find extra cash — they compressed everyone else's pay to fund the floor. Your qualifications, your training, your risk — the premium you earned for doing the hard job — got eaten alive. The NMW "bite" (the floor as a % of median pay) has gone from 47% to 67%. That's not the floor rising. That's your ceiling coming down.
Every line is a real job. The orange floor is the National Minimum Wage. Watch them converge.
"Britons are lazy." "There's no work ethic anymore."
All the downstream cultural effects you hear about are just a function of eroded incentives. If you're in the bottom half of the income distribution, hard work doesn't pay very well. A 3-year nursing degree buys you £3.69/hr over a barista. A trainee firefighter earns 20p/hr more than a shelf-stacker. An army private risks their life for 59p/hr above the legal minimum.
So why work hard? Why seek to progress? Why take the difficult job, the antisocial hours, the physical risk? The rational answer, increasingly, is: don't. That's not laziness. That's the labour market responding to a price signal the government broke.
Every job ranked by how much of its pay premium the NMW has absorbed since 2010. Biggest losers first.
Hourly pay: Median hourly rates from ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), Tables 14 and 15, cross-referenced with NHS Agenda for Change, police/fire pay scales, and MOD published rates. 2026 figures are estimates based on confirmed pay awards and NMW uprating.
Minimum wage: Adult rate (21+) from gov.uk. 2026 rate of £12.71/hr effective 1 April 2026. Prior to April 2021 the top rate applied to those 25+; we use the top adult rate throughout for consistency.
Compression ratio: Job hourly pay ÷ NMW rate for that year. A ratio of 2.0x means you earned twice minimum wage. A ratio of 1.0x means you are on minimum wage.
Difficulty premium: The difference between your hourly pay and the NMW, expressed in £/hr. This is what your training, qualifications, risk, and unsocial hours are actually worth in the market.
Typical skilled pay rise (+32%): Derived from ONS ASHE median hourly pay for full-time employees, all occupations, 2010 vs 2024. The NMW rose 3.5× faster over the same period.