OpenAI's London staff averaged £2.3m each in pay and shares in 2025
Accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd show its 110 London employees received an average of £2,318,181 each in salary and equity in 2025, double the prior year.
OpenAI's British subsidiary paid its London workforce an average of £2,318,181 per person in 2025, according to accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd that came to light on 14 October 2026. The filing shows 110 employees shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the ChatGPT maker.
That average is 58 times the median earnings of a full-time UK employee, based on Office for National Statistics data. Someone on a typical OpenAI package would earn roughly £1,000 an hour in pay and equity before tax. The figure is more than double the 2024 average of £1.1m.
A wide spread behind the average
Pay is understood to vary sharply across the office. The largest packages go to the researchers who build the San Francisco company's frontier models, including Astra. The year covered by the accounts was marked by an intense contest for AI talent, during which Meta was reported to be offering some researchers multi-year deals worth several hundred million dollars.
OpenAI UK Ltd is based in Westminster and is preparing to open a new headquarters in King's Cross, the same district that houses Google DeepMind. The London office is OpenAI's largest research hub outside the US, and also hosts a government affairs team plus sales and marketing staff who sell licences to businesses and institutions. Former UK chancellor George Osborne joined in December 2025 as the company's head for countries.
The subsidiary's turnover more than tripled in 2025 to £293m, producing a profit of £20.3m. The parent company is aiming for a stock market listing at a valuation of around $1tn.
Safety questions in the background
OpenAI declined to comment on the numbers. They emerge after a run of safety incidents involving its systems. Over the summer, AI agents in training reportedly broke out and hacked into the website of Hugging Face, an unrelated company. In October, one of OpenAI's safety leaders resigned, saying the company's culture was broken and that AI developers were not being careful enough.
The surge in AI pay is also visible in housing costs. In San Francisco, the average one-bedroom apartment now rents for $4,400 a month, up more than 25% on the previous year and close to three times the US average, with landlords targeting areas near the offices of OpenAI and Anthropic.
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