What is LondonPayWizard?

Group Most people in the UK don’t know how much other people earn. We at PayWizard don’t think this is a very satisfactory situation. After all, if you don’t know how much someone else is getting for doing the same job as you, how do you know you’re being fairly paid?

This is particularly true for working women. We’ve all heard about the ‘gender pay gap’, the gulf between men and women’s pay which persists in spite of 30 years of equal pay legislation, but what can you actually do about it?

London has more pay issues too. As living costs in the capital are higher than in other areas of the country, wages tend to be higher too. But not all bosses are so generous - Are you getting a higher wage in recognition of where you work and live?

Well, for a start, use the Wizard yourself and see what it has to say about you.

Row of people The idea behind this new website is simple enough. It allows you to compare your pay with the wages of other people doing a similar job, while sparing your blushes at having to pop the question to the person who works next to you.

It’s not just sheer nosiness. If you’re preparing to talk about pay with your employer, wouldn’t it be handy to know how much other people doing the same thing earned in other companies?

And what if you’re thinking of changing direction in your career? One thing that will almost certainly be on your mind is whether there’s a pay rise or a pay cut awaiting you. LondonPayWizard lets you look at pay rates for hundreds of different jobs in all walks of life – private sector, public sector and not-for-profit. All for free.

HandshakeLondonPayWizard is part of an international research network. The project started four years ago in the Netherlands. It has since grown into a free service available to, and used by, people in all manner of jobs – nurses, bankers and lathe operators alike, in many countries around Europe and further afield.

The system in each country is the same. Together, a national trade union organisation and a research institute set up and maintain a website. In London, the partners are SERTUC – the London arm of the Trade Union Congress – and Incomes Data Services, the UK’s leading employment research organisation. The project is supported by the Office of the Mayor of London.

Face This is where you come in. LondonPayWizard relies on people in all sorts of different jobs, to give us information about their employment conditions. There are a couple of things you should know about this: the data is completely anonymous and we won’t ask you the name of your employer.

All you need to do is fill in the online survey. It won’t take you more than 10 minutes. In return for letting us know about one person’s pay, yours, you get to find about thousands of other people’s pay. We think it’s a good deal.

People You might be an enlightened soul who agrees that the LondonPayWizard is a simply a Good Thing both for working Londoners, helping people to make the most of their jobs.

Or we could remind you that LondonPayWizard is a radically new way of doing international social science research and will help researchers and policy-makers get a clearer idea of what goes on in the real labour market, in London and also around the world.

Or we could point out that, unlike other similar services, the pay information you give us is scientifically ‘weighed’ and cleaned up before it is fed into to database, meaning that you get more reliable information coming out.

We might even be able to sway you by telling you that one lucky participant will win a safari holiday in our prize draw.

But no, we’ll stick with the simple motto: knowledge is power. The more you know about what other people get paid, the more likely it is that you’ll be earning what you’re worth.

So get involved now, by taking the online survey.