GeraJobs / Gera Real Pay Index / Methodology
Gera Real Pay Index — Methodology
Every number on the Gera Real Pay Index traces to a real, free, government dataset. The novelty is the join and the composite — never an invented value. Here is the exact computation, so anyone can reproduce it.
Source datasets
- Nominal pay — Office for National Statistics. ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) 2025, median gross annual pay for full-time employees by 4-digit SOC 2020 occupation and region (April 2025 reference period). OGL v3.0.
- House prices — HM Land Registry — UK House Price Index (UKHPI), Average house price by local authority (GBP) (April 2026). Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
- Council tax — MHCLG — Council Tax levels set by local authorities in England 2026 to 2027, Band D area council tax incl. all precepts (GBP/year) (Financial year 2026-27). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
The area-code join
The three datasets use different geographies. ONS ASHE publishes by Government Office Region. House prices and council tax publish by local authority (ONS GSS codes E06/E07/E08/E09), each carrying its parent region via the ONS “Local Authority District to Region” lookup. We aggregate the local-authority house-price and council-tax figures to the region by taking the unweighted mean of the published authority rows, then join to ASHE on a normalised region name (ONS region labels — “East” not “East of England”; “West Midlands” not “West Midlands Region”).
Coverage rule: a region enters the index only when all three inputs exist for it. That yields England's 9 Government Office Regions. Scotland and Wales have ASHE and house-price data but are excluded because council tax is published England-only on a different basis — we never treat a missing input as zero. Energy cost is dropped entirely: Ofgem's price cap is a single GB-wide figure and its regional split is not published in machine-readable form, so rather than fabricate a regional energy figure we omit it.
The computation, step by step
- Nominal regional pay. For each region R,
nominal(R)= the median, over the occupations ONS publishes a regional cell for, of that occupation's region-R median. Suppressed cells are excluded, never estimated. - Cost level. Each cost input is expressed relative to the 9-region mean:
houseRatio = avgHousePrice(R) ÷ meanHousePriceandcouncilRatio = bandDCouncilTax(R) ÷ meanCouncilTax. ThencostLevel(R) = 100 × (0.70 × houseRatio + 0.30 × councilRatio). Housing is weighted 0.70 because it varies far more across regions (roughly 3.5× top-to-bottom) than council tax (about 1.2×) and dominates real cost-of-living differences; council tax — the main recurring statutory household cost — takes the remaining 0.30. costLevel = 100 is the 9-region average. - Real (cost-equivalent) pay.
real(R) = nominal(R) × (100 ÷ costLevel(R))— deflates expensive regions, inflates cheaper ones, so figures are comparable in purchasing-power terms. - The Gera Real Pay Index.
GRPI(R) = real(R) ÷ meanNominal × 100, to one decimal, wheremeanNominalis the mean of the 9 regional nominal medians (£34,382). GRPI > 100 means your salary goes further than the average region. - Occupation × region. For an occupation O with a published region-R median
m,realOcc(O,R) = m × (100 ÷ costLevel(R)). National percentiles shown for context are the real ONS 10/25/75/90 percentile points; a salary's percentile is interpolated piecewise-linearly between them (never extrapolated past the published anchors).
| Region | Avg house price | Band D council tax | Cost level | Nominal | Real | GRPI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| North East | £163,313 | £2,526 | 69.2 | £31,514 | £45,536 | 132.4 |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | £203,421 | £2,374 | 76.6 | £32,606 | £42,564 | 123.8 |
| North West | £213,624 | £2,483 | 80.3 | £34,131 | £42,492 | 123.6 |
| East Midlands | £245,841 | £2,457 | 87.5 | £33,387 | £38,175 | 111.0 |
| West Midlands | £262,565 | £2,400 | 90.6 | £32,913 | £36,324 | 105.6 |
| South West | £306,898 | £2,511 | 102.3 | £32,878 | £32,152 | 93.5 |
| East | £360,445 | £2,391 | 113.2 | £34,580 | £30,560 | 88.9 |
| South East | £391,573 | £2,475 | 121.4 | £36,391 | £29,974 | 87.2 |
| London | £574,624 | £2,090 | 159.0 | £41,034 | £25,811 | 75.1 |
House-price and council-tax figures are unweighted regional means of the published local-authority rows. All inputs are real OGL v3.0 government data; the index is a deterministic computation over them.
Last computed 2026-06-19. The Gera Real Pay Index is published by GeraJobs (a Gera Services product). Reproducible from the cited ONS, HM Land Registry and MHCLG datasets.