OpenAI paid its 110 London employees an average of about £2.3m each in 2025, counting salaries and shares, according to the Guardian's reporting on the accounts of OpenAI UK Ltd.
Robert Booth, who wrote the Guardian story, reported that the staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares. That adds up to £255m, and dividing by 110 gives the £2.3m figure. Split out, salary comes to roughly £790,000 a head and shares to roughly £1.53m, so stock made up about two-thirds of the total.
That mix is the part worth noticing. A salary arrives every month. Shares are a claim on a company's future value, and because OpenAI is privately held, their worth rests on its latest valuation rather than a daily market price. Pay that leans this heavily on equity ties a London researcher's income to how the company is valued, not just to the work done.
Two cautions apply to the headline number. It is a mean, so a handful of senior researchers could pull it far above what a typical employee in the office receives. And it is a total divided by headcount, which says nothing about how the money was spread.
Even the salary slice alone, at around £790,000 a head on average, sits far above what most UK tech workers earn. That fits a pattern across the AI industry, where a small pool of experienced researchers is courted by several well-funded labs at once, and equity is the usual tool for winning them.
The accounts cover one subsidiary in one year. The open question is whether London is an outlier or a template for how OpenAI pays staff in its other offices.