Sector trends · 2017–2025
The pay gap is narrowing almost everywhere. Education is the exception.
Of the 17 UK sectors with enough filings to benchmark, 15 narrowed their median gender pay gap between 2017 and 2025. Two went the other way: Education and Administrative & Support.
Education is the one worth watching. Its median gap moved from 19.1% in 2017 to 20.0% in 2025 — +0.9 points, at 1,906 classified employers. It is now the third-highest-gap sector in the country.
Financial & Insurance, the sector immediately above it, has been falling fast enough that the two are converging even though Education itself is not improving. In 2017, Financial & Insurance’s median gap sat 4.5 points above Education’s. By 2025, the gap between them had narrowed to 0.3 points — entirely because Financial & Insurance moved, not because Education did.
Every sector, ranked
Median hourly pay gap by sector, 2025. Construction remains the widest gap of any sector despite narrowing 3.0 points since 2017.
Education against its nearest rival
Education’s median gap has moved within a narrow band since 2017. Financial & Insurance’s has fallen steadily toward it. The provisional 2026 reporting year, still filing, is not shown.
Where the biggest improvements happened
The three sectors that closed their gap fastest since 2017:
- Public Admin & Defence — 8.2% to 3.1% (−5.1 points)
- Real Estate — 10.1% to 5.2% (−4.9 points)
- Information & Communication — 18.0% to 14.0% (−4.0 points)
One employer inside Education shows how far a single filer can move: Waterton Academy Trust’s gap widened from a low of 20.0% in 2021 to 50.99% in 2025, in a workforce that is 91% female. More cases like it, in both directions, in When a company’s pay gap moves against its own industry.
What this does and doesn’t show
A sector median is not weighted by workforce size and does not establish that any individual employer treats staff unfairly — see what the figures mean. It does show where the UK-wide trend of narrowing gaps has stalled, and Education is currently the clearest case of that.