Salary by job · SOC 8111
Food, drink and tobacco process operatives: £28,243 median, £23,855 after tax
Median full-time pay for food, drink and tobacco process operatives is £28,243 a year. After income tax and National Insurance that leaves £23,855, or £1,988 a month. The figure rests on 126 thousand full-time jobs in 2025 and is below the median for the occupations in this dataset by £7,620.
| Median gross | £28,243.00 |
| Income tax | −£3,134.60 |
| National Insurance | −£1,253.84 |
| Take-home | £23,854.56 |
| Per month | £1,987.88 |
The whole range, after tax
A median hides the spread, and the spread is usually what someone wants. These are the percentile points ONS published, each run through tax.
| Percentile | Gross | After tax | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10th | £21,541 | £19,029 | £1,586 |
| 20th | £23,529 | £20,460 | £1,705 |
| 25th | £24,471 | £21,139 | £1,762 |
| 30th | £25,227 | £21,683 | £1,807 |
| 40th | £26,707 | £22,749 | £1,896 |
| 60th | £30,294 | £25,331 | £2,111 |
| 70th | £32,658 | £27,033 | £2,253 |
| 75th | £33,889 | £27,920 | £2,327 |
| 80th | £35,190 | £28,856 | £2,405 |
| 90th | £40,489 | £32,672 | £2,723 |
So the bottom tenth take home about £1,586 a month and the top tenth about £2,723 — a gap of £1,137 a month within the same job title.
Check your own figure
These are survey medians, not a pay scale — your own salary is the one that matters. Put it through the take-home pay calculator with your pension and student loan, see where it sits among all UK taxpayers with the salary percentile calculator, or compare two offers with the salary comparison calculator. If you work part time, the pro rata calculator scales a full-time figure like the ones above to your hours.
What is the average salary for food, drink and tobacco process operatives in the UK?
The median full-time salary is £28,243. ONS publishes the median rather than the mean because a handful of very high earners pull an average upwards and make it unrepresentative. Half of full-time food, drink and tobacco process operatives earn more than £28,243 and half earn less.
What is £28,243 after tax?
£23,855 a year, or £1,988 a month — after £3,135 income tax and £1,254 National Insurance, on a standard tax code with no pension or student loan.
What is the salary range for food, drink and tobacco process operatives?
The lowest-paid tenth earn under £21,541 and the highest-paid tenth earn over £40,489. That is a spread of 1.9× from the 10th to the 90th percentile, which is relatively narrow for a UK occupation.
Is £28,243 a good salary in the UK?
It is £7,620 below the median across the occupations in this dataset, and puts someone on roughly the 46th percentile of all UK taxpayers. Whether that is good depends on where you live more than almost anything else.
Pay data: ONS, Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, Table 14.7a, 2025 provisional, released 2025-10-23. Source. Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Full-time employees only — ASHE's all-employee medians mix part-time pay in, which reads low for any part-time-heavy job. Tax computed on 2026/27 rates. Not tax advice.