A £15 per hour minimum wage would impact 70% of full-time workers in one part of the UK. The Trades Union Congress has said that the minimum wage should be increased to £15 per hour.
The minimum wage is currently set at £9.50 an hour for workers over the age of 23, £9.18 for 21- and 22-year-olds, and £6.83 per hour for 18- to 20-year-olds. People would often struggle on these wages before the cost of living crisis, and with inflation passing 10% things are only going to get worse.
A wage of £15 per hour for a full-time worker on a standard 37-hour week works out as a salary of £28,860 a year before tax. That’s just below the national average of £31,419, according to the latest earnings data from the Office for National Statistics.
However, regional variations mean that a raise in minimum wage would impact more full-time workers in some regions of the UK than others. In South Tyneside for instance, the average full-time worker earns £24,804 a year.
The 70th percentile, meanwhile, earn an average of £28,727 a year, which is less than the £15 per hour salary. This means that 70% of full-time workers in the region are likely to see an increase in salary if the minimum wage was increased to £15 per hour.
There are a total of 167 local authority areas in the UK where the average full-time worker earns less than £28,860 a year, suggesting that a £15 per hour minimum wage would see their salaries increase. That includes 31 areas where 60% of workers would see an uplift.
Middlesbrough is one of those areas, with the 60th percentile there earning £27,908 per year.
In Burnley the 60th percentile earn £26,144 a year. In Merthyr Tydfil they earn £28,446 a year. In Hastings it’s £26,332 a year, and in Mansfield it’s £27,857. Areas where the average worker earns less than the equivalent of £15 per hour include Sunderland (£26,752 per year), Stockport (£27,466), Burnley (£23,287), Wirral (£27,029), Bradford (£28,713), Huddersfield (£26,717), Ipswich (£28,241), and Stoke-on-Trent (£28,370).
