What your audience earns is public

“Affluent” is the vaguest word in a brief, and it usually arrives without a number attached. The pay tables make it a number with a source, and the numbers sit lower than the briefs assume. The series hub covers the sources.

Medians first, then percentiles#

UK median full-time pay is £39,039 a year. The top tenth of full-time earners starts at £76,903, so a £100,000 salary is rarer than most briefs assume.

Median full-time pay in the UK is £39,039 a year, £766.60 a week, as of April 20251. The 90th percentile, the line above which the top tenth of full-time earners sit, is £76,903.

A campaign targeting £100k+ earners is, outside London, chasing a group the pay tables can barely find. A £100k household is usually two people, which changes the creative.

London runs its own scale. The capital’s median is £46,414 on a residence basis, £49,692 on a workplace basis, and its 90th percentile is £106,2032. Quote the basis when you quote the city. Residence and workplace give different answers, and they get mixed up constantly.

By occupation and place#

Occupation crossed with area gives a sized, priced audience: London professionals on £57,057, corporate managers on £91,982.

The same tables break by occupation to four-digit detail. London professional occupations run a £57,057 median against £48,739 for the same group nationally; London managers and directors £82,380; corporate managers £91,9822. Define an audience as “professional occupations, London, top quartile” and you have a sized population with a documented income. “ABC1 adults 25 to 54” is roughly half the country.

From earnings to spending#

Pay is per person; buying is per household. The richest tenth of households spends £1,345.60 a week, the poorest £291.30.

Pay is measured per person. Buying happens at household level, so the household tables matter more for most categories. Median household disposable income was £36,700 in the year to March 2024, with the richest fifth at £71,100 and the poorest at £16,8003. The spending side concentrates harder than the income side: total weekly spend runs £1,345.60 in the richest tenth of households against £291.30 in the bottom4, and category by category the gap is often steeper, like clothing and footwear at £34.80 a week in the top decile against £6.00 in the bottom, which the suits brief is built on4.

For a premium category, start from the spending tenths. The useful question is which tenth of households can fund the habit.

Down to the neighbourhood#

Modelled small-area income joins to any postcode file through the geography lookup.

The small-area income estimates model household income at neighbourhood grain for England and Wales5. Joined to the postcode lookup from the geography piece, they put an affluence layer under any postcode-level file.

What I would do#

”Affluent” goes in a brief only with a number and a source attached; sanity-check creative against the £39,039 median.

Ban “affluent” from briefs unless it carries a number and a source. Audiences defined as occupation crossed with area work because both are published and both are targetable, and age arrives as a consequence. Sanity-check every creative brief against the £39,039 median.

Where this argument is weakest#

The government pay survey misses the self-employed, the 2025 figures are provisional, and pay is not wealth.

The 2025 pay figures are provisional until the revised release. ASHE covers employees on PAYE, so the self-employed, from the freelance designer to the equity partner, are missing from every number above, and in some premium categories they are half the buyers. Household income measures are equivalised, which makes them fair for comparison and confusing next to raw pay figures. The percentile ratios here are arithmetic on published numbers rather than published numbers themselves. And pay is not wealth: a retired household can be low-income, high-asset and still the best customer a cruise line ever had, which is a gap the pay tables cannot see.