The Datum Report

Occupation 5422 · Skilled trades occupations

Printers

Half of full-time printers in the UK earn more than £33,019 a year, and half earn less.

Printers set up and operate various small offset printing presses and digital printing processes.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic requirements although some employers may require GCSEs/S grades. Training is typically received on-the-job. Traineeships and apprenticeships in Machine Printing are available at NVQ/SVQ levels 2 and 3.

What the work involves

• positions form or plate on machine, checks alignments and sets press
• mixes and loads inks and solvents, loads paper and regulates during print run
• prints and examines proof copies and adjusts press as necessary
• starts or directs start of printing run and monitors machine to ensure that printing proceeds smoothly
• pours colour into machine or directly on to screen and positions screen over item
• operates squeegee by hand or machine to press colour through screen
• dips wooden pattern block into colour tray and lays different colours on top of, and adjacent to, others to form the required pattern
• produces, transfers and outputs digital print images
• maintains, adjusts, repairs and cleans machine
• keeps production records

Also called

Digital printer · Lithographic printer · Machine minder (printing) · Print technician · Screen printer · Wallpaper printer

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for printers, 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. 6 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

Pre-press technicians · Print finishing and binding workers