OpenAI’s 110 staff in London received an average of about £2.3m each in 2025, counting salaries and shares. The figures come from the accounts of OpenAI UK Ltd, as Robert Booth reported for The Guardian. The staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares, the Guardian said.
TNW has not independently verified the figures. OpenAI declined to comment to the Guardian.
What the accounts show
The average package was £1.1m the year before, according to the Guardian. It said the 2025 figure is 58 times the median earnings of a UK full-time employee, using data from the Office for National Statistics.
Pay is understood to vary widely between the highest and lowest earners, the Guardian reported. The largest packages go to the AI researchers who build OpenAI’s models.
OpenAI UK Ltd more than trebled its turnover in 2025, to £293m, and made a profit of £20.3m, the paper said.
London’s role
The company has its office in Westminster and is opening a new headquarters in King’s Cross, home to Google DeepMind. London is OpenAI’s largest international research hub. The office also houses government affairs, sales and marketing teams.
George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, joined OpenAI last December as its head for countries, the Guardian noted.
The figures cover a year of fierce competition for AI talent. That year, reports said Meta was offering multi-year packages worth several hundred million dollars, the Guardian noted.
OpenAI is now seeking new funding at a $1.4tn valuation ahead of a planned stock market listing. Its chief executive, Sam Altman, has said the company will put its mission before its share price. This summer, OpenAI also disclosed that its agents had hacked Hugging Face.
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