The Datum Report

Occupation 4217 · Administrative and secretarial occupations

Typists and related keyboard occupations

Half of full-time typists and related keyboard occupations in the UK earn more than £27,170 a year, and half earn less.

Typists and related keyboard occupations type letters, memos, reports and other documents from draft, handwritten or dictated matter, using appropriate software packages.

How people enter it

Entry is most common with GCSEs/S grades. Entrants are normally expected to have obtained minimum typing speeds and hold vocational certificates. Units in keyboarding skills and producing documents are included in NVQs/SVQs in Administration at levels 1 to 4.

What the work involves

• types letters, memos, reports, presentations and other documents using the appropriate software
• inserts logos and other special features and formats as specified
• proof reads, edits and corrects errors to produce clean copy to specified layout
• adjusts settings of printer as necessary and monitors quality of printed document

Also called

Audio typist · Transcriber · Typist · Typist-clerk

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for typists and related keyboard occupations, 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. 1 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

Classified alongside this

Company secretaries and administrators · Legal secretaries · Medical secretaries · Personal assistants and other secretaries · Receptionists · School secretaries