The Datum Report

Occupation 9222 · Elementary occupations

Street cleaners

Half of full-time street cleaners in the UK earn more than £27,633 a year, and half earn less.

Street cleaners clean, sweep and remove refuse from public thoroughfares.

How people enter it

No academic qualifications are required. On-the-job training is provided. Vocational qualifications in Cleaning and Support Services Skills are available at levels 1 and 2.

What the work involves

• sweeps pavements, gutters and roadways with hand broom or mechanical sweeper
• collects litter using hand tools
• transfers refuse into containers and empties public litter bins into containers.

Also called

Cleansing operative (street cleaning) · Litter picker · Road sweeper · Street cleaner

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for street cleaners, 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. 5 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

Cleaners and domestics · Elementary cleaning occupations n.e.c. · Launderers, dry cleaners and pressers · Refuse and salvage occupations · Vehicle valeters and cleaners · Window cleaners