The definitive 2025 UK Permanent Salary & Consultant Day Rate Survey for Bid, Proposal and Work-Winning Professionals (“the survey”), the sixth conducted by Bid Solutions, delivers against four aims:

1. Publish the definitive report of the UK’s permanent employee salaries and Consultant/ freelance day rates.
2. Enable employees and Consultants to confidently benchmark their salaries and day rates.
3. Provide employers with accurate benchmark information for hiring a permanent and/or flexible workforce.
4. Highlight inequalities and market dynamics since the 2022 survey.

1,422 professionals across the UK participated in the survey to provide employers, employees and self-employed Consultants with valuable results for salary/day rate benchmarking, staff retention, peer review and career/business planning.

Unless otherwise stated, all salaries/day rates in this report are an average of basic rates across all roles and locations and any conclusions or assumptions presented relate only to the 2025 survey data.

Guidance Notes

No analysis is presented where the source data set is less than 1% of total respondents (<14 respondents), which accounts for any omissions on charts and graphs. A complete list of definitions can be found in Appendix 1.
The 2025 survey contains insufficient data to accurately report on:
• Gender-variants (as such, this report provides information only on male and female identities)
• Graphic Design roles
• Knowledgebase / Proposal Content Manager roles
• Northern Ireland
All statistics published in this report should be regarded as guidelines rather than absolute values. Many factors affect salaries so an exact benchmark is not possible.

Since our last survey in April 2022, the cost of goods and services (RPI) in the UK has increased by 17.8%. Please factor this in when assessing percentage increases compared to the 2022 data.

Rounding differences may affect final percentages.