The Datum Report

Occupation 7112 · Sales and customer service occupations

Retail cashiers and check-out operators

Half of full-time retail cashiers and check-out operators in the UK earn more than £24,622 a year, and half earn less.

Retail cashiers and check-out operators accept payments from customers and give change in respect of sales or services.

How people enter it

There are no minimum academic requirements although some employers may require GCSEs/S grades or relevant experience. Training is typically provided on-the-job. Vocational Operations in Retail Operations are available at levels 1 and 2.

What the work involves

• records cost of each item on cash register or by use of bar code reader and totals the amount to be paid
• receives cash, cheque or debit or credit card payment, checks validity of form of payment, gives change and issues receipts for purchase
• debits customer’s account in respect of purchases or services
• monitors fuel taken by self-service customers or refuels vehicle if required
• maintains transaction records as requested

Also called

Cashier (wholesale trade) · Check-out operator · Customer team member (retail trade) · Forecourt attendant · General assistant (check-out: retail trade) · Till operator

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for retail cashiers and check-out operators, 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. 11 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

Pharmacy and optical dispensing assistants · Sales and retail assistants · Telephone salespersons · Vehicle and parts salespersons and advisers