2025 UK founder salaries revealed

“How much should I pay myself?” is the question every founder asks – and one investors love to weigh in on.

Set the salary too low, and you’re living on instant noodles. Set it too high, and you risk raising eyebrows in the boardroom.

So what’s “normal”? The truth is, there isn’t one standard founder salary. But the data does give us benchmarks.

We’ve analysed UK funding rounds over the last five years to give you clear benchmarks on what founders actually pay themselves – and how those salaries shift with round size, stage, and investor expectations.

How we measured founder salaries

We analysed UK funding rounds that have closed on SeedLegals in the last 5 years and grouped them into round sizes:

• 🌱 Small rounds: < £200k
• 🪴 Medium rounds: £200k–£700k
• 🌳 Large rounds: £700k–£10m+

Each founder is counted individually, so if a company has multiple founders, we tracked each salary separately.

Founder salary vs amount raised

Unsurprisingly, salaries increase as round size goes up. Here’s the 2025 data:

• Small rounds (<£200k): founders keep salaries low – around £25k–£40k is common, with many founders not taking a salary at all.
• Medium rounds (£200k–£700k): salaries typically rise into the £40k–£60k range.
• Large rounds (£700k+): founders are more likely to pay themselves £80k–£100k+.

That said, there’s a wide range. Even at larger rounds, plenty of founders still take minimal pay (trading salary for runway and equity), while others move closer to market-level salaries.

How this stacks up against the wider market

For context: the average UK software engineer earns between £41k – £66k (sources), while senior roles in London push past £80k. A founder raising a Series A or beyond is paying themselves at a level broadly comparable to their senior hires.

Vesting terms and cliff periods

Salary is only one part of the equation. Equity structures are just as critical. To avoid founders taking the money and retiring, investors usually require that founders ‘reverse vest’ their shares over a number of years.

Reverse vesting means that if a founder leaves during the vesting period, they need to transfer back the unvested shares. Even if their shares are fully vested before the round, investors will often ask for a new vesting schedule to dissuade the founders from leaving right after their investment.

Here’s what the data shows about founder vesting:

• More than half of founders have their shares subject to vesting. Only in smaller rounds do we see that ‘no vesting’ is very slightly more common.
• 3- and 4-year vesting periods are by far the most common across all round sizes, with ‘3 years’ and ‘no cliff’ being the most common.
• 1-2 year or 5-year vesting is rare, appearing in fewer than 10% of cases.
• Some very early-stage founders still skip vesting altogether or adopt shorter cliffs (6 months).

Read more on vesting:

• Founder vesting: reasons why it’s important 
• Shares and option vesting explained

How salaries have changed over 5 years

Between 2020 and 2025, founder pay has risen steadily across all round sizes:

• Small rounds (<£200k): increase from £30k to £50k
• Medium rounds(£200k- £700k): increase from £40k to £55k
• Large rounds (>£700k+): increase from £60k to £83.7k

Talk to our experienced team

Raising? Got questions about funding, equity or share option schemes? Book a free call with our team. We’d love to answer your questions and find out how we can help.