The Datum Report

Occupation 2440 · Professional occupations

Business and financial project management professionals

Half of full-time business and financial project management professionals in the UK earn more than £59,834 a year, and half earn less.

Business and financial project management professionals manage and oversee major projects across all sectors of modern industry, commerce and the public sector, in areas such as e-commerce, business analysis, finance, product development, marketing, human resources.

How people enter it

Entry may be via a degree or postgraduate qualification in project management or a subject relevant to the particular sector or via significant relevant work experience in that sector.

What the work involves

• finds out what the client or company wants to achieve
• agrees timescales, costs and resources needed
• draws up a detailed plan for how to achieve each stage of the project
• selects and leads a project team
• negotiates with contractors and suppliers for materials and services
• ensures that each stage of the project is progressing on time, on budget and to the right quality standards
• reports regularly on progress to the client or to senior managers

Also called

Chief knowledge officer · Contracts manager (security services) · Project delivery officer · Project manager · Research support officer · Scrum master · Work package manager (professional)

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for business and financial project management professionals, full-time employees, 2023 to 2025. Each point is that year's ASHE April snapshot as published — revisions are not backfilled into earlier years, and a year ONS withheld is a gap rather than a joined line.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Year-on-year change

The change from each year to the next, in per cent, computed from the figures in the chart above — so the two cannot disagree.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Table

Pay by region

Median gross annual pay for full-time employees, ranked, against the UK figure. 10 of 11 regions are published: ONS withholds a cell where the survey sample cannot support it, and those are shown as gaps rather than dropped — an absent region is not a region without the work in it.

ONS, ASHE Table 14 - occupation by four-digit SOC (national). Period 2025. Table

Every regional figure

ONS does not publish occupational pay below region. Cells the survey could not support are shown as withheld, with its reason — adding a region split to a specific occupation leaves roughly a tenth of cells publishable.

Common questions