Thinking about your next move in accountancy and finance? One of the biggest questions you'll face is how much you're really worth.
Salary guides, job adverts and conversations with friends can all provide a useful starting point, but they rarely tell the full story. The reality is that salaries vary depending on your experience, the value you bring to an organisation, and what employers are prepared to pay for the right person.
In this blog, we'll explain why published salary figures only tell part of the story and share practical advice to help you approach your next salary discussion with confidence.
What You Will Learn in This Post
Why the salary figure you are working from is almost certainly the wrong one for your next finance move
The exact questions to ask a specialist recruiter so you find the top of the band before you name a number
How to judge an offer on the whole package instead of the base salary alone
The salary mistakes that cost accountancy and finance candidates the most, and how to avoid every one of them.
Why My View of Salary Differs From Yours
You change roles every few years. I watch offers land every week. You see the advertised figure. I see the counteroffer, the stretch budget, and the reason the last candidate was turned down over 3K.
That is not cleverness on my part; it's experience.
Anyone sitting between employers and candidates all day builds a picture that no published survey can match.
The point of this post is not to impress you with what I know. It is to show you how to pull that knowledge out of me, or any specialist accountancy and finance recruiter you work with.
The Number You Are Working From Is Not Your Number
Published averages blend every employer, every region, and every level of skill into one figure. They are useful to economists and unfortunately close to useless when you are pricing your own move.
Office for National Statistics earnings data puts the median full-time UK salary at around 39,000 GBP, with average weekly earnings growth settling near 3% for 2026.
This number tells you what a finance professional with your experience could be worth. Two people can share a job title and sit in completely different pay markets.
What sets your rate is the value you create, the scarcity of your skill set, and how urgently this employer needs the problem solved; and a salary site cannot see any of that.
What to do about it
Stop benchmarking yourself against a national figure. Ask a recruiter who works your niche what they have closed in the last ninety days for someone at your level. That is your benchmark.
How to Talk Money With a Recruiter Without Being Priced Low
Candidates hold back their salary expectation because they fear being underpaid and undervalued; we understand the instinct.
In practice, it works against you far more often than it protects you.
We are judged on placements that last. Someone who joins underpaid resigns within a year, and that failure lands on us.
The mistake is not sharing your number. The mistake is sharing it before you have asked for the information that lets you set it well. So ask first.
Four questions worth asking before you name a figure
"What is the full band for this role, and what does the top of it look like?"
"What kind of profile usually gets offered the top of that band?"
"What have you closed recently for a similar finance in the North East?"
"Where has this employer stretched before, and where do their offers usually stop?"
A specialist recruiter will answer all four, because none of it damages the placement. If someone will not answer, that tells you something about who they are working for.
Then give your number and anchor it in the market rather than in your outgoings. "Based on what you have told me, I am looking at X" is a stronger position than "I need X."
The Stretch Figure Nobody Advertises
Most employers brief me with two numbers. There is the range they expect to pay. There is also a figure they will stretch to if someone arrives who ticks every box.
The second number is released late, once the employer can compare you with everyone else, they have met and recognise what it would cost to lose you to a competitor.
There are limits. Pay compression is real. Hiring you well above loyal team members creates a problem the manager then has to live with, and internal bands narrow the room further.
Your job is to give me a reason to argue. Bring evidence of what you have delivered, in numbers where you can. I can push a band with proof. I cannot push it with hope.
Negotiate the Package, Not the Base
Base salary is the figure you repeat to friends. It is rarely the figure that decides how well off you are twelve months later.
Consider two offers. One carries a higher base, fifty-hour weeks, and steep healthcare costs. The other pays less, protects your hours, and covers more. The second often leaves you better off.
Bonus, commission, pension contributions, shift and on-call payments, equity, and holiday/paid time off all carry real money. Ask your recruiter to price the whole offer, not just the headline.
Where the base will not move, the package often will. Sign-on payments, an early review date, extra holiday, and study support are usually easier to sign off than a band breach.
How to Use Pay Transparency in Your Favour
The UK has no blanket requirement to publish ranges in adverts, although government guidance is pressing employers toward greater openness. European rules requiring published ranges from June 2026 are already shaping UK-based multinationals.
A published range only helps you if you know how honest it is. Ask your accountancy and finance recruiter where in that range candidates like you have landed recently, and why.
Where salary history questions are barred, employers price you against their internal bands and against the last person they hired.
The Salary Mistakes That Cost Candidates Most
Treating an advertised range as fixed. The stretch figure exists, and it is decided at the end of the process, not the start.
Naming a number based on your bills rather than the market. It invites a debate you cannot win with evidence.
Judging an offer on base salary alone and discovering the true cost of the role in month three.
Refusing to discuss pay at all until the final stage, then losing weeks to a process that was never going to reach your figure.
Accepting the first offer because it beats your current salary, without asking what the market pays someone with your profile.
Every one of these is avoidable with a single conversation before you start applying. That conversation costs you nothing and routinely changes the number at the end.
Where This Leaves You
Moving remains the fastest route to a step change in pay. Staying still tends to mean standing still.
In the UK, analysis of 2026 pay awards shows most employers clustering around 3%, so an internal rise is unlikely to match what a well-judged move delivers.
A move made badly, though, costs you two years. The difference is almost always the advice you took before you started, and how early you took it.
You do not need to become a salary expert. You need someone in your corner who already is. Take a look at the accountancy and finance roles I am working on right now to see where this market sits today.
Send me your CV, tell me what you want to earn, and I will tell you honestly whether the market agrees. If it does not, I will tell you exactly what would change that.
Natalie Marshall
Senior Recruitment Consultant