Benchmarking is an important part of any salary negotiation – but it’s absolutely crucial for Product Managers in small and mid-sized companies. In a role with opaque and varied pay, being able to point to credible data is critical to your case for a raise. This article gives you the latest and most relevant UK Product Manager benchmarks and shows you what pay progression throughout a typical PM career looks like.

PMs in small-ish Tech companies are often underpaid – here’s why

Reliable UK Product Manager benchmarks are hard to come by.

When you look at job descriptions for Product Manager roles in small and mid-sized companies, you’ll find that there’s a massive variety in pay.

You might see two roles that look almost identical – same responsibilities, same experience required – but one offers double the salary of the other. Sometimes, even a single Product Manager job post lists a huge pay range (e.g. £50-100k), with a vague note that the final offer will “depend on experience”.

There are multiple reasons why pay for Product Managers is so opaque and varied – especially in small to mid-sized companies (think less than 500 employees):

  • Roles aren’t clear cut: earlier-stage companies often want their PMs to be designers, project managers, marketeers, UX researchers and strategists all in one. Pretty hard to put a price tag on that.
  • PM backgrounds vary: if you pick a random Product Manager in Tech and ask them what their previous role was, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you they used to be a Founder, Strategy Consultant, Designer, Product Marketer, etc. There are PMs in Legal-Tech who used to be lawyers, PMs in Fintech who used to be traders, PMs in HR-Tech who used to be recruiters. All of them come in with different backgrounds and salary histories, driving huge variations in pay for PMs.
  • Impact is (supposedly) less measurable: when you’re in Sales, it’s pretty straightforward to measure your value to the company and remunerate you accordingly. The salesperson who earns the company less than their own pay check rarely gets to stick around for long. In Product, on the other hand, it’s harder (though by no means impossible) to put a number on the value you deliver.
  • Small companies are heterogeneous: some of them are extremely well-funded, others are bootstrapped; some are profitable, others aren’t; some pay top-dollar to attract top talent, others worry about runway and try to keep salaries low; some give their employees generous equity awards, others don’t; some have truly Product-centric Founders / Executives, others are run by people who don’t understand what a Product Manager does. All of which drives massive differences in pay.

All of the above makes having solid UK Product Manager benchmarks so much more important – when pay is varied and opaque, being able to point to credible data which supports your case for a raise is critical.

That’s what we’ll tackle in this article. It will…

Let’s get started with the data.

External UK Product Manager benchmarks

First things first: if you haven’t tried the SalarySphere Benchmarking Tool yet, now’s the time. It compares your pay to other Product Managers at a similar level and in companies of a similar size – plus, it shows you some benchmarks against the wider UK population (admittedly not super relevant for your pay rise negotiation but very fun). Give it a go.

Now, there are 2 types of external benchmarks: (aggregate) market benchmarks and individual benchmarks.

(Aggregate) market benchmarks for UK Product Managers

These are average or percentile-based salary figures taken from the broader market. When you read somewhere that “the median salary for UK Product Managers is £X,” that’s a market benchmark. As such, the SalarySphere Benchmarking Tool is a source of market benchmarks – it compares your salary to aggregate summary figures for Product Managers in a wide variety of similar-size companies.

These benchmarks are incredibly useful for getting a high-level sense of how well you’re paid. And if they come from a credible source, they can serve as strong data points in a pay negotiation.

The problem? Good market benchmarks for UK Product Managers are surprisingly hard to come by. Most people just glance at Glassdoor – which leads to using benchmarks that are:

  • Inaccurate: all entries are self-reported, with no quality checks (and sometimes an incentive to enter fake data)
  • Not relevant: much of the data reflects large corporates, which may not match your company’s size or stage
  • Out of date: platforms like Glassdoor rarely remove old data
  • Distorted: there is no clear levelling structure so every variation of job title gets its own average salary
  • Simplified: Glassdoor usually only shows salary averages, but what if you’re interested in higher percentiles?

The good news? I’ve done the heavy lifting for you and have personally compiled UK Product Manager benchmarks based on an insane amount of ultra-relevant salary data from…

This means the numbers are…

  • Verified: no dodgy sources, only real salaries
  • Specific: full focus on Product Manager pay, specifically in companies with <25, 25-100 and 100-500 employees
  • Recent: not a single data point is out of date
  • Comprehensive: not just the median but also higher (and lower) percentiles

So with no further ado, here you go – this is what Product Managers in the UK are paid (all numbers are rounded).

SalarySphere market benchmarks

UK Product Manager Benchmarks in Tech for different company sizes

Now, don’t automatically focus on the Median. If you don’t see yourself as average at your job, you should compare yourself to the 75th or 90th percentile.

In terms of seniority levels – while the exact titles / designations may vary by company, roles generally follow this pattern in companies with less than 500 employees:

  • Junior PM: entry-level role, typically straight out of university with little to no prior experience
  • Product Manager: 1-2+ years of experience as a Product Manager, or someone hired into the role with equivalent prior experience in a related field
  • Senior PM: at least 3 years of experience in Product Management (often more). Some PMs remain at this level for a long time, either by choice or due to limited advancement opportunities
  • Principal / Staff PM: highly experienced and/or specialised PMs who choose to remain individual contributors. More common in larger companies with mature product orgs
  • Head of Product: experienced PMs who take ownership of the overall product development, strategy, and coordination with other departments. In larger orgs, there may be multiple Heads of Product, each responsible for a specific product area
  • Director / VP of Product: senior leadership roles overseeing multiple product teams or an entire product line. Typically responsible for hiring, performance management, product vision, cross-functional alignment, and translating business goals into product strategy. As such, more common in companies with >100 employees
  • CPO: executive-level role with ultimate responsibility for the product function. Often part of the executive leadership team. In companies with fewer than 100 employees, this role is rare unless held by a founder

Note some interesting patterns in these UK Product Manager benchmarks:

  • The most senior roles don’t usually exist in smaller companies – a 20-person start-up doesn’t usually have a VP of Product (they usually just have a (Senior) Product Manager or maybe a Head of Product); equally, a 50-person scale-up doesn’t tend to have a CPO
  • Across companies of all sizes, there’s loads of variability in pay – again emphasising that pay for Product Managers isn’t well standardised; there is lots of room to negotiate; and the size of your company matters less than the value your company assigns to its Product team
  • In companies with <25 employees, the variety of pay is particularly pronounced – a Senior PM could be paid anywhere between £55,000 (10th percentile) and £100,000 (90th percentile)
  • Pay is typically higher the larger the company, though for some seniority levels, the difference isn’t actually that big (the median pay for a mid-level PM is £68,000 in companies with 25-100 employees and £70,000 in companies with 100-500 employees)

PM progression path

I’ve used the UK Product Manager benchmarks above to map out the typical pay progression of a UK PM as they advance through the ranks in companies of different sizes (using the 75th percentile salaries as the baseline – again, you shouldn’t aim for the median unless you think you’re average at your job).

If you stay in Product Management, this is a good approximation of what you could make over the next years.

UK Product Manager benchmarks - progression by seniority level

Again, note some interesting patterns:

  • At a £225,000 CPO pay check, the ceiling is pretty high in Product: you’ve chosen a decent field; obviously, you can push that ceiling even higher if you go into larger organisations

  • Pay gaps between company sizes are larger on senior levels: while companies with 100-500 employees pay relatively similar amounts to smaller companies on more junior levels, the gap widens on more senior levels, with a Director of Product being paid £40,000 more than in a company with less than 100 employees

  • The jump from Principal PM to Head of Product isn’t large: being a really senior, experienced individual contributor PM can be just as lucrative as being a Head of Product who manages other PMs or has wider responsibilities around strategy setting and cross-functional collaboration

Other market benchmarking resources

All that said, don’t feel like you have to solely rely on SalarySphere for your UK Product Manager market benchmarks – you can of course look for them elsewhere, too. Here are some decent 3rd party data sources for aggregate benchmarks (ordered by quality of data):

  • Paid benchmarking tools: the likes of Figures, Ravio and Pave have a relatively rich dataset specifically for small to mid-sized companies and allow users to set filters specifically by company funding stage, number of employees, etc. They also have very good coverage of Product roles. In that sense, they’re great data sources. The only problem is they’re geared towards companies (rather than individuals), meaning you usually pay £5,000+ per year for access…
  • Benchmarking reports: some recruiters and compensation platforms put together free benchmarking reports (which you often need to enter your email to download). While they usually try to cover a wide variety of roles, Product almost always features among them. Here some examples:
  • Levels.fyi: has lots of data for Product (and Engineering) roles, though it’s quite US-centric and focused on larger companies
  • DIY salary surveys: you’ll sometimes find recent threads in relevant communities or forums where someone has put together a survey for Product Manager salaries. Here’s an example from Reddit. While you can usually find some relevant data points, the data is often hard to verify and potentially out of date
  • Payscale: their Earnings Potential tool is quite cumbersome to go through and the benchmarks that come out the other end aren’t particularly tailored. That said, it’s still better than…

All these data sources should be pretty useful for you to understand where you sit and what you might be able to get out of a pay negotiation.

That said, the draw-back of market benchmarks is that, being aggregate figures, they are a bit of a black-box and hard to verify. Basing your whole pay negotiation on these aggregate benchmarks is risky, because companies can always find ways to refute them.

Say you tell your company that, based on SalarySphere figures, you’re paid £15k below the market. Most likely, your company will say something along the lines of “You can’t trust summary benchmarks as they don’t reflect the specific market we’re in / the intricacies of your role / our funding stage. We’re using our own benchmarking software and it tells us that you’re paid competitively compared to the market.”

This is where individual benchmarks come in.

Individual benchmarks for UK Product Managers

Individual benchmarks are, very simply, specific data points of what your salary could look like in another company. Where market benchmarks can be argued away, individual benchmarks are difficult to refute:

If you tell your employer “Here are 5 jobs whose profile perfectly fits me and which all pay £10-15k more than my salary”, it’s very hard to argue with that. Importantly, even if those jobs are in companies that are larger or in a different industry, as long as the profile fits you and you could conceivably land these jobs, it’s hard for your company to argue why they shouldn’t pay you a comparable amount.

So, think about it this way – market benchmarks are for you, to set the right target for your pay negotiation; individual benchmarks are for your company, to help them understand that your target is appropriate.

There are surprisingly many good resources out there to find credible job ads and other data points from companies with less than 500 employees which you can use for your negotiation. I’ve listed them all out in the PM Pay Rise Playbook – take a look if you’re keen to easily identify credible and specific UK Product Manager benchmarks.

Keep these 3 things in mind when looking for individual benchmarks:

  • Don’t be scientific: it’s not your job to find the “true” picture of the market – it’s your job to make your case. Pick and choose the job ads that most work in your favour. The only “condition” is that you need to conceivably be able to do the job. Think about “jobs I could have”, rather than “jobs that are exactly the same as my job””. For instance, if you work for a company with 50 employees, don’t shy away from using benchmarks from companies with 200. After all, you could easily switch to a slightly larger company.
  • The more the merrier: the more credible data points you can point to, the better your argument. If you can only find a single example of a Product role that pays the salary you’re aiming for, you’ll have to make a strong case why you should be paid that much. If, on the other hand, you find 5, then that’s easy pickings.
  • Pick London-based roles: even if you’re not based in London, don’t shy away from using individual benchmarks from roles based in London. After all, you could conceivably take a job with a company based in London. Again, it’s not your job to worry about the benchmarks being perfect. Let them try to explain why you should be paid less than someone with the same skill set just because you live a few miles apart.

Right, that’s your external benchmarking done. Let’s move on to…

Internal UK Product Manager benchmarks

Where external benchmarking is concerned with comparing your pay to that of other Product Managers in the market, internal benchmarking is all about comparing yourself internally.

Importantly, that doesn’t just mean comparing your salary to that of other PMs in your company. It’s more widely about finding internal data points that help build your case from inside the system.

Complementing your external UK Product Manager benchmarks with internal data points comes with two major benefits:

  1. Internal benchmarks are hard to argue with: your Founder / line manager / People person might dismiss external benchmarks as “not fully comparable” or argue that your company approaches compensation differently than others (e.g. with more emphasis on equity). But if you’re paid less than a colleague who delivers equal value, it’s plain unfair – and much harder to argue away.

  1. It makes it easier for your company to give you a pay rise: when you argue from market data alone, you’re often creating a new problem for your company: how to justify why you get more, but not others. Good internal benchmarking solves that for them as you’re handing them a clear rationale on a silver platter.

Now, let’s get specific. Here are the kind of internal signals you’re after.

Pay of other PMs

This one’s the most obvious. Try to find out how much other PMs in your company are paid. Obviously, if it turns out there’s someone on your level who gets paid more than you, that’s a pretty strong argument for you right there.

More likely, there won’t be a smoking gun but some subtle inconsistencies, such as:

  • A more junior PM with less impact who’s paid almost the same as you
  • A slightly more senior PM who’s paid significantly more despite similar scope
  • A PM with a higher title and salary but equal (or less) responsibility and ownership
  • A PM who received more generous stock options when joining
  • A PM who got promoted faster despite delivering similar results
  • A PM who switched teams and received a raise, even though their role remained largely the same
  • A job ad for a new PM role that advertises pay above yours – in other words you’d be paid more if you were hired into your own role today

Pay of colleagues in related roles

Run through the same exercise as above – but broadened to include colleagues in adjacent functions, particularly Design, Engineering, and Product Marketing.

You might spot the same kinds of inconsistencies:

  • A Designer or Engineer at the same level earning more than you
  • A Product Marketer with a narrower scope who’s been promoted faster or given a more generous package
  • Etc.

Or you might uncover a more structural undervaluing of Product Management. If PMs are paid significantly less than Engineers or Designers across all levels, that’s worth noting.

Remember that AI is increasing the relative value of the PM role in the market. More and more Engineering and Design tasks are being automated – but writing the requirements, prompting the AI, setting the strategy, prioritising features and running discovery with customers are not.

The PM role is absolutely crucial for most companies so don’t shy away from making the case for the same or higher pay than related functions within your company.

Internal structures

Analyse inconsistencies in the company’s compensation processes, e.g. its levelling framework / salary bands / competency framework / promotion processes.

Here are some common inconsistencies to look out for (depending on the process maturity of your company, some of these may not apply):

  • Where do you sit within your level’s salary band? E.g. are you towards the bottom of the band even though you’ve been in the role for a long time?
  • Are you performing at a level above your current pay grade and title according to the company’s capability matrix?
  • Have recent policy changes worked against you? E.g. did you miss out on enhanced parental leave or increased equity allowances purely due to timing reasons?
  • Are promotions applied consistently across the company? E.g. has someone with less tenure or impact been promoted ahead of you?

Pay rises

This final data point sits somewhere between internal and external UK Product Manager benchmarks – pay rises.

According to Ravio, UK Product Managers who didn’t receive a promotion got an average salary increase of 5% in both 2024 and 2025.

So, look out for the following:

  • Did you get lower than market-average pay rises over the last years?
  • Did you get lower than company-average pay rises over the last years?
  • Did colleagues with an equally or less favourable performance review than you get higher pay rises?
  • Were others given larger raises due to role changes, retention concerns or counter-offers – while you were overlooked?
  • Have pay rises been linked to funding rounds or team changes, and did you miss out due to timing?

Right, by now you should have a good understanding of what the market for PMs looks like; have identified some credible individual benchmarks to make that point to your company; and backed up your benchmarking with arguments based on the company’s own compensation philosophy or processes.

So, that’s your benchmarking done. Congrats!

If you’ve followed along, I’d be surprised if you didn’t have at least 5–10 solid data points by now, both internal and external, to support your case for a raise, e.g.

  1. Based on SalarySphere market benchmarks, your pay is 10% below the 75th percentile for your level (which your company is aiming for).

  1. You found 4 open PM roles at your level with other Tech companies, all of which pay £5,000-15,000 more than your current pay.

  1. Your colleague Sam was only just promoted to the same seniority level as you but is paid the same – even though you’ve been in this role for 18 months

  1. In spite of the fact that you’re getting great performance review and have been in your role for 18 months, your pay isn’t near the top of your salary band

  1. According to your company’s capability framework, you’re actually performing at a seniority level above your current grade – and the salary band for that level starts £12,000 above your current pay

  1. An Engineer who is more junior than you and objectively delivers less for the company than you do is paid £5,000 more than you

  1. You got a 3% pay rise for the last two years – significantly lower than the market average and effectively below inflation

But the most important step is still missing – what do you actually do with your benchmarks? How do you use them to get the pay rise you’re gunning for?

To answer that question, let’s look at how companies approach benchmarking and what it means for you.

How small and mid-sized companies benchmark – and why it matters

Start-ups (<25 employees)

How they benchmark

  • Benchmarking is done informally when there is a specific need (e.g. when hiring or during key retention events)
  • The company may structure benchmarks by large business functions (e.g. Tech, Commercial, Ops)
  • Information is mostly gathered from free online sources or the Founder’s network

What it means for you

  • You’ll have to take the lead on the process as your company is unlikely to pro-actively benchmark your role and increase your pay at this stage
  • You’ll have to educate them on how you’ve approached your benchmarking, what resources you used, etc.
  • Whatever numbers you find may surprise them – you’ll initially want to frame your benchmarks as helpful context
  • There is usually a larger emphasis on equity in early-stage businesses so prepare for push-back in that regard (“As a start-up we can’t compete with the market on salary but keep in mind that we allocate a large number of stock options as part of your compensation”).

Scale-ups (25-100 employees)

How they benchmark

  • Benchmarking is done once a year as well as as well as ad-hoc when needed (e.g. when hiring a new role for the first time)
  • Rather than benchmarking individual roles, companies often group roles together (e.g. Product & Engineering; Sales & Customer Success)
  • Benchmarking sources typically include (a) job descriptions from similar companies, (b) data points from investors or other founders (often including crowd-sourced spreadsheets), (c) free data tools like Levels.fyi or Glassdoor

What it means for you

  • Your company has likely done some rudimentary benchmarking and is in the process of creating its first compensation and levelling framework
  • As such, they’ll be keen to ensure that their salary bands are aligned with the market and will likely be curious where your benchmarks come from (there’s a good chance they don’t quite trust their own yet)
  • So again, prepare to explain your approach and where your UK Product Manager benchmarks come from
  • If your company benchmarks your role as part of a cluster (e.g. Product & Design, rather than Product), they mis-benchmark your seniority level – look out for any inconsistencies

Mid-sized Tech companies (100-500 employees)

How they benchmark

  • All roles are benchmarked annually; additional benchmarking is sometimes triggered when pay inconsistencies emerge as the company is growing
  • Benchmarking data feeds into updates of compensation bands which have by now been defined
  • Companies typically pay for dedicated benchmarking tools (e.g. Figures, Ravio, Pave) or benchmarking add-ons of their existing HR software (e.g. HiBob, BambooHR)  

What it means for you

  • Your company is almost certainly benchmarking your role with paid software and as such, has more confidence in their numbers
  • Therefore, there will be a higher burden of proof onto you to show them why your benchmarks more accurately reflect your role / the market than theirs
  • The specifics become more important – you’ll need to argue your benchmarks quite granularly (why did you choose this dataset, this seniority level, etc.)
  • Your company likely benchmarks on an annual basis so it helps if you can highlight any market shifts or recent data they might have missed

Now, let’s contrast all this to the processes in large-scale enterprises.

Enterprise-level companies

How they benchmark

  • Each granular role in each geography is benchmarked on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to ensure the company remains in step with the percentile they are targeting in their pay philosophy (e.g. 75th percentile)
  • Tens to hundreds of thousands of £ are spent on benchmarking software, reports and consultants every year; typical data sources include Radford, Mercer, Willis Towers Watson
  • Dedicated Reward Managers are in charge of all compensation processes, incl. benchmarking  

What it means for their employees

  • There are dedicated Reward Managers whose sole job it is to ensure that the company has competitive and fair compensation in place
  • As such, any benchmarks employees come up with are likely numbers the Reward Managers are aware of and have either already considered for their salary bands or dismissed as not relevant
  • Negotiating pay based on benchmarks becomes much harder – instead, leverage has to come from showing a misalignment within the company’s compensation framework (e.g. a role being mis-levelled); in other words, it’s not about shifting their view of the market, but about how employees are positioned within their established system

So, the fact that you work for a small to mid-sized company is a huge benefit when it comes to benchmarking (and negotiating) your pay.

As opposed to Big Tech, your company may not benchmark compensation at all or if they do, they may be pretty insecure about the benchmarks they have. So, being able to present credible benchmarks actually makes a real difference.

Landing a pay rise

Now, benchmarking is an important step in the process of landing a pay rise – but it’s just that, one step. Most successful pay rise negotiations follow the same pattern:

  1. You identify a credible trigger to negotiate a raise (esp. if done outside of the company’s regular pay review cadence)
  2. You benchmark your role – both externally and internally ✅
  3. You demonstrate your value to the company
  4. You build leverage to give your negotiation some additional energy
  5. You set your target, taking into account the information you’ve uncovered
  6. You present your case for a raise in a productive way

If you’re keen to use your UK Product Manager benchmarks to negotiate a pay rise, check out the PM Pay Rise Playbook, which guides you through the process step-by-step. The Playbook is specifically designed for UK PMs in Tech companies with less than 500 employees and helps you to…

  • Get the salary you deserve: whether you already have an idea what this salary is or whether you are yet to set a target, it’ll equip you with the tools you need to get it
  • Get it now:  get a pay rise even if no pay review is scheduled right now
  • Get it while improving your working relationships: there will be no burning of bridges and no awkwardness. You’ll get the tools and templates to have a poised and productive discussion that will make people see you in an even more favourable light
  • …using an approach tailored to you: you’ll be achieving all of the above by using a framework and strategy used exclusively by (and designed specifically for) Product Managers in companies with less than 500 employees. No generic “negotiation hacks” – a specific approach for your situation
Check out the Playbook