UK Weekly Earnings Hit £720. That Changes the Maths on Automation

The ONS estimated average weekly earnings in Great Britain at £720 for total pay and £674 for regular pay in April 2025, with annual growth of 5.2% for regular earnings and 5.3% for total earnings. Adjusted for inflation using CPIH, real growth was 1.4% and 1.5% respectively.

Read that as an input cost, not a headline. Every hour of internal administrative work in a UK business is now more expensive than it was a year ago, and it will be more expensive again next year. Nothing about that trend is unusual or unwelcome — it is what a tight labour market does — but it changes the arithmetic on any process you have chosen to run manually.

The useful calculation is deliberately crude. Take a recurring internal task, estimate the hours it consumes each week across everyone who touches it, and price those hours off your own payroll rather than a national average. A task consuming ten hours a week at a fully loaded £25 an hour is roughly £13,000 a year of capacity. Compare that with the one-off cost of connecting two systems so the task stops existing.

In our experience the tasks that clear this bar are boringly consistent: re-typing enquiry details from an inbox into a CRM, rebuilding the same quote from a spreadsheet template, chasing internal approval by email, and reconciling one system's customer record against another's. None of them require AI. They require the two systems either side of the gap to talk.

The trap is measuring the saving in hours and stopping there. Hours freed only become a return if they are redirected to work that generates revenue — sales conversations, delivery quality, account expansion. Where we have seen automation fail commercially, it was almost always because the reclaimed time silently absorbed into the same day.

With pay growth at 5.2% and real pay still rising, the cost of doing nothing compounds. Pick the two most repetitive handoffs in your business this quarter, price them off your own payroll, and fix the more expensive one.