The Datum Report

Occupation 5112 · Skilled trades occupations

Horticultural trades

Half of full-time horticultural trades in the UK earn more than £27,262 a year, and half earn less.

Horticultural trades workers intensively cultivate vegetables, plants, fruit, shrubs, trees and flowers in greenhouses, market gardens, nurseries and orchards.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic entry requirements. NVQs/SVQs in Horticulture are available at levels 1, 2 and 3. Relevant apprenticeships and professional qualifications from the Royal Horticultural Society are also available.

What the work involves

• prepares soil in field, bed or pot by hand or machine
• mixes soil, composts, fertilisers and/or organic matter and spreads fertiliser and manure
• sows seeds and bulbs and transplants seedlings
• propagates plants by taking cuttings and by grafting and budding, applies weed-killer, fungicide and insecticide to control pests and diseases
• prunes and thins trees and shrubs
• supports trees by staking and wiring

Also called

Grower · Horticulturalist · Market Gardener · Nursery Assistant (agriculture) · Nurseryman

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for horticultural trades, 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. 2 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

Agricultural and fishing trades n.e.c. · Farmers · Gardeners and landscape gardeners · Groundsmen and greenkeepers