The Datum Report

Occupation 9252 · Elementary occupations

Warehouse operatives

Half of full-time warehouse operatives in the UK earn more than £27,832 a year, and half earn less.

Warehouse operatives load, unload and convey a variety of goods, equipment or other items in warehouses and depots, prepare requisitions or despatch documents of stocks held, and perform other elementary goods handling and storage related tasks.

How people enter it

There are no formal academic entry requirements. Training is typically provided Off or on-the-job. NVQs/ in Warehousing and Storage are available at levels 1, 2 and 3.

What the work involves

• undertakes the loading and unloading of goods and conveys goods about storage area
• packs furniture and household goods into crates and cartons for storage
• retrieves stored items as listed on order sheets, makes up orders against requisitions and prepares goods for despatch
• checks goods for damage or missing stock and maintains an inventory of stock
• cleans and maintains warehouse

Also called

Order picker · Storeman · Team member (warehousing) · Warehouse operative · Warehouseman

What it pays

How pay has changed

Median gross annual pay for warehouse operatives, 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

Delivery operatives · Elementary storage occupations n.e.c. · Elementary storage supervisors