Roughly £2.318 million per person: that is the average total compensation OpenAI UK Ltd recorded for each of its 110 employees in 2025, according to the company’s Companies House accounts. The figure combines an average cash salary of approximately £794,000 with roughly £1.5 million in share-based awards, nearly doubling the approximately £1.1 million average reported the prior year.
Context matters here. This is not take-home pay. Share-based awards are tied to OpenAI’s private-company valuation, which can move in either direction, and their precise vesting terms are not established by the accounts alone.
The Numbers Behind the Headline
The breakdown between cash and equity reveals more about how frontier AI firms compete for researchers than any single salary figure could.
OpenAI UK Ltd’s accounts show £87.4 million in wages and salaries alongside £167.8 million in share-based compensation, producing total staff costs of approximately £258 million for the year. Share-based awards alone represent nearly 65 percent of that total.
The per-person average is real arithmetic, but it almost certainly obscures a wide range of individual packages underneath. A small number of senior researchers and technical leaders almost certainly pull the mean well above what most employees receive. The dynamic mirrors how a handful of outliers skew any average, pulling the figure away from the typical experience.
OpenAI did not provide a public comment on the reported figures. At OpenAI UK Ltd in 2025, the £167.8 million in share-based compensation alone exceeded the subsidiary’s entire revenue from the previous year.
London’s Role in the AI Talent War
OpenAI’s UK subsidiary grew revenue sharply while positioning London as its most significant research base outside the United States.
OpenAI UK’s revenue climbed from £79.2 million to £292.9 million during the 2025 financial year, and the subsidiary recorded an after-tax profit of approximately £20.3 million. The London office covers research and development, government affairs, sales, and marketing. OpenAI has described it as the company’s largest international research hub outside the United States.
London sits alongside Google DeepMind and draws from a broad pool of UK and international talent from European university researchers. That access to academic and technical talent reinforces the city’s value as a strategic location, not merely a commercial one. At OpenAI UK Ltd in 2025, equity-based compensation exceeded wages and salaries by a wide margin, illustrating how share awards have become the dominant recruitment tool at this level of the industry.
What Happens If the Valuation Shifts
Compensation packages built around private-company shares carry a risk that fixed cash salaries do not.
Packages structured around private-company equity lose value if the underlying valuation contracts. The extent of any loss depends on award terms, vesting conditions, and liquidity. None of these are fully disclosed in the Companies House accounts.
The 2025 accounts confirm that the London operation is profitable and that revenue grew sharply during the year. Whether the equity attached to that expansion holds its value is a separate question. Companies House filings cannot answer it.
