The Datum Report

Occupation 7123 · Sales and customer service occupations

Roundspersons and van salespersons

Half of full-time roundspersons and van salespersons in the UK earn more than £27,401 a year, and half earn less.

Roundspersons and van salespersons deliver and sell food, drink and other goods by calling on householders or by selling from a mobile shop or van and call on households to collect and receive payment for laundered or similarly serviced articles.

How people enter it

No academic qualifications are required but candidates should hold a clean driving licence. Off and on-the-job training is provided.

What the work involves

• loads vehicle with food, drink, or articles that have been laundered, etc.
• drives vehicle over established route and parks at recognised stopping places or households
• calls at customers’ premises and delivers ordered goods
• calls out, rings bell or otherwise attracts attention to the items on sale
• sells goods, records deliveries, takes further orders or articles requiring servicing and collects cash or prepares bill
• returns to depot and hands in unsold goods and cash

Also called

Dairyman (retail trade: delivery round) · Ice-cream salesman · Milkman (milk retailing) · Roundsman · Van salesman

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for roundspersons and van salespersons, 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

Collector salespersons and credit agents · Debt, rent and other cash collectors · Market and street traders and assistants · Sales related occupations n.e.c. · Visual merchandisers and related occupations