OpenAI’s London staff receive average of £2.3m per person annually

OpenAI is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1.1tn. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/ReutersView image in fullscreenOpenAI is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1.1tn. Photograph: Dado Ruvić/ReutersOpenAI’s London staff receive average of £2.3m per person annuallyAccounts for the Westminster-based company behind ChatGPT show that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares last year

OpenAI’s London staff each received £2,318,181 on average last year, as the ChatGPT-maker poured Premier League football salaries into its bid to dominate the global AI race.

Accounts for OpenAI UK Ltd, which is based in Westminster but is opening a new HQ in London’s King’s Cross area, showed that 110 staff shared £87m in salaries and £168m in shares in the company, which is aiming to list on the stock market at a valuation of about $1tn.

The earnings amount to 58 times the median UK full-time employee earnings, according to the Office for National Statistics. An OpenAI worker on an average package could expect to take home about £1,000 an hour in salary and equity before tax.

But there is understood to be a wide discrepancy between the highest and lowest earners. The biggest compensation packages are reserved for AI researchers who help build the San Francisco company’s cutting-edge models such as Astra.

The figures relate to 2025, when there was a talent war and OpenAI’s rival, Meta, was reported to be offering multi-year packages running into several hundred million dollars.

OpenAI’s London base reflects the UK capital’s status as an important hub for AI talent with some of the brightest machine-learning experts and AI researchers coming out of universities such as Cambridge. Google DeepMind is also based in King’s Cross.

The company declined to comment on the figures, which come after a series of AI safety crises involving its models. This summer AI agents, under training, escaped and hacked into an unrelated company website, Hugging Face, while this month one of its safety leaders quit, saying that its culture was broken and that AI firms were not “being nearly careful enough” about developing the technology.

OpenAI’s London office has been established as its largest international research hub but it also houses a government affairs team and sales and marketing functions – responsible for selling licences to companies and organisations. George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, joined last December as the company’s head for countries.

The earnings were a big jump on the previous year, when the average pay and equity package was £1.1m.

Booming AI salaries have already had a significant effect on housing prices in San Francisco, where the average one-bedroom property now rents for $4,400 per month, a figure that is up more than 25% from last year and is nearly three times the US average. Landlords have been trying to capitalise on the boom, particularly in areas closest to the offices of the biggest AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic.

In London, OpenAI UK Ltd recorded a more than trebling of its turnover in 2025 to £293m, on which it made a £20.3m profit.