Where the numbers
come from.

Every salary figure on Salary Scout comes from two Stonor Search publications:

• Stonor Search Marketing Salary Benchmark 2025: salary bands for PR, social media, promotional merchandise, digital, creative, marketing data and analytics, market research, AI and machine learning, SaaS analytics and MedTech data roles. Built from the roles Stonor fills and the offers it sees made and accepted, mostly agency side.
• Stonor Search SaaS & Tech Salary Benchmark 2025: UK-average and London-average bands for go-to-market, customer success, partnerships, operations, finance, people, engineering, cloud and security, AI and data, supply chain and procurement roles inside software and technology businesses.

Both reports draw on Stonor's placements, vacancies registered with Stonor, candidate salary expectations gathered in interviews, and the consultants' day-to-day view of the market. The reports were compiled in 2025 and imported into Salary Scout on 2 September 2026.

We don't currently blend in third-party salary surveys, job-board scrapes or government statistics. If we ever add an external source to fill a genuine gap, it will be stored with its own source name and date and shown as "supplementary market estimate", never presented as Stonor data. Right now, 289 of 296 records are Stonor's own. That's all of them.

The reports publish salary bands: a lower figure and an upper figure for a job title at a given level. Salary Scout turns those into four things.

• Lower range is the bottom of the published band. When several bands feed one result (a blended title, or two reports covering the same role), it's the lowest of them.
• Upper range is the top of the published band, or the highest across contributing bands.
• Typical salary is the midpoint of the published band, rounded to the nearest £500. It is not a separately surveyed median. When more than one band contributes, we average the midpoints. Treat the range as the real answer and the typical figure as a sensible place to start a conversation.
• Confidence tells you how directly the data answers your question (see below).

Quartiles and sample sizes are not published in either report, so we don't show them. Where the source gives an open-ended figure such as "£85,000+" (5 records) we keep it open-ended rather than guess an upper bound, and mark it as limited data.

• High confidence: a published Stonor band exists for this exact role and location.
• Good confidence: a Stonor band exists for the role, but we've had to widen the location (for example a UK-wide figure for a South East search), blend close titles, or ignore the sector filter.
• Limited data: the closest we have. A different level on the same ladder, a neighbouring job family, or an open-ended or single-figure source. Useful for orientation, not for setting a budget.

Confidence only ever goes down as we widen the search. It is never inflated to make a result look better.

Job titles in marketing and SaaS are inconsistent to the point of comedy. Salary Scout keeps a catalogue of 77 canonical roles, each with a list of alternative titles. "SAE", "Senior Account Executive" and "Senior PR Account Executive" resolve to the same benchmark. The search box also tolerates typos.

For 5 common umbrella titles that the reports don't publish as a single band (for example "Marketing Manager" or "Account Manager"), we blend the closest published benchmarks at the chosen level and say so on the result. We never present a blend as a published figure.

If you pick a level the report doesn't publish for a role, we show the nearest published level, tell you which way to adjust, and drop the confidence to limited.

The reports publish London and UK-average bands. Salary Scout offers a full list of UK regions because that's how people search, and then steps out gradually:

1. Exact role, exact location and sector (and company size where we hold it).
2. Role and location, ignoring sector.
3. Role and the broader region (for example London and the South East).
4. Role and the UK-wide benchmark.
5. The same role at the nearest published level.
6. The closest roles in the same job family.

Every time we step out, the result says so in plain English ("This is a UK-wide benchmark. We don't yet hold enough Manchester data for this role to be more precise."). If we reach the bottom of the ladder with nothing, we say we'd rather not guess.

Figures are annual base salary in GBP for full-time permanent roles. They exclude bonus, commission, equity, pension and benefits. That matters most for sales, partnerships and customer success roles, where on-target earnings can be well above base, and for promotional merchandise roles, where base salaries flex with commission structure. Contract and freelance day rates are not covered.

Benchmark period: 2025. Imported: 2 September 2026. Stonor publishes its salary benchmarks annually and we refresh Salary Scout when a new edition lands, or sooner if Stonor's consultants see a band move materially between editions. Every result and salary page shows its own "last updated" date, and the records carry the source name so you can tell which report a figure came from.

• Sample sizes are not published, so we can't show how many placements sit behind a band. The bands reflect Stonor's own placement and vacancy activity, which is concentrated in marketing services agencies and UK SaaS and AI businesses of 10 to 1,000 people.
• Regional data beyond London versus UK average doesn't exist in the source, so a "North West" result is a UK-wide figure with the caveat attached.
• Company-size splits aren't published. The company size filter is there for when Stonor adds them; today it doesn't change the result and the form says so.
• Where both reports cover the same role (for example Machine Learning Engineer), the bands differ because the client bases differ. We show the combined range and name both sources rather than pick a winner.
• Supply chain and procurement roles are in the calculator but don't have dedicated salary pages; they sit outside Stonor's core marketing, SaaS and AI focus.

If you think a band is wrong, or you have live evidence it has moved, tell Stonor. The consultants would rather correct a number than defend it.