Is the UK insurance sector closing its pay gap? 2026 update
Insurance has one of the widest gender pay gaps of any part of the UK economy, so the question of whether it is closing matters more here than almost anywhere. The short answer in 2026 is that it is narrowing, slowly, and from a high base, with the senior and best-paid roles still the sticking point. The honest answer is that the sector average hides enormous variation between individual insurers, which is where the real story, and your decision, lives.
This 2026 update looks at what the latest official figures show about the direction of travel, why the gap is so stubborn, and how to check whether a specific insurer is genuinely closing its gap rather than reporting a flat number year after year. It builds on our fuller sector analysis, is the UK insurance industry good for women.
Where the insurance pay gap sits in 2026
Begin with the caveat that governs everything else, because it is easy to get wrong. The Office for National Statistics does not report insurance on its own. It is folded into a single industry group, financial and insurance activities, alongside banking and asset management. There is no official standalone insurance figure, and anyone quoting one precisely is using a different source or guessing.
What the ONS does show is stark and stable. Financial and insurance activities is the industry group with the largest full-time gender pay gap in the UK, running well above 20% by median hourly pay in the April 2025 figures. Set that against the national benchmark, which the ONS put at 6.9% for full-time employees and 12.8% across all employees in April 2025, down from 13.1% the year before. The sector gap is roughly three times the national one. It is also the best-paid industry group for full-time workers in the UK, and those two facts are connected rather than contradictory.
Is it actually closing?
Yes, but gently, and the movement is clearer in representation than in the headline gap. HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter, the sector’s main voluntary commitment, has reported steady rises over the past decade in the average proportion of women in senior roles across signatory financial services firms, with most signatories meeting or on track to meet their own targets. That is meaningful movement from where the sector started, and it is still short of parity.
The headline pay gap moves more slowly than representation does, because it depends on women reaching the highest-paid roles in numbers, which takes promotion cycles measured in years. So the pattern in 2026 is a gap that is edging down rather than falling sharply, with the clearest progress at the point of getting more women into senior roles and the slowest progress at the very top. A sector closing its gap looks exactly like this: unglamorous, incremental, and only visible across several years of data.
Why the gap is so stubborn
A gap this size is almost never men and women being paid differently for the same job. That is unequal pay, it is unlawful, and it is a separate issue, which our explainer on the pay gap versus equal pay sets out.
The insurance gap is mostly about which roles women hold. Women are well represented in insurance overall and concentrated in claims, administration, customer operations and support functions. They are far thinner in underwriting, broking, actuarial, investment and executive roles, which is where the money and the bonuses sit. Average a workforce shaped like that and a wide gap appears even where pay for any given role is fair. Two things make it worse: bonuses form a large share of reward in parts of insurance and bonus gaps run wider than pay gaps, and part-time working, more common in insurance than in banking, clusters in the lower-paid functions. The flexibility that keeps women in the industry also holds the average down.
That is why closing the gap is slow. It requires moving women into the revenue-generating and senior technical roles, and keeping them through the mid-career years when caring responsibilities peak. Neither happens in a single reporting cycle.
How to tell if a specific insurer is closing its gap
The sector average is the weather, not the employer. Within insurance you will find firms reporting single-digit gaps with women across every pay quartile, and others above 30% with almost no women in underwriting or on the executive committee. The average tells you very little about any individual company, so check the one you care about.
The data is free and public. Every UK employer with 250 or more staff publishes its gender pay gap figures on the government service at gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk. For judging whether a gap is closing, the trend is everything. Read the median and mean across the last three or four reporting years, not a single snapshot. A gap that is narrowing year on year shows follow-through; a flat gap shows an employer that has stopped trying. Watch the share of women in the top pay quartile over the same period, because that is the number that has to move for the gap to close. And read the bonus gap, which in insurance is often the most revealing figure of the set. Our guide to reading a company’s gender pay gap figures walks through each one.
Then compare the insurer against other insurers rather than against the whole economy, and read the trend as the real signal. That peer comparison and the multi-year view are exactly what the RecruitHer company gender scorecard pulls together, and you can read the method in how the scorecard works. For the neighbouring picture in banking and asset management, our companion piece on whether the UK finance industry is good for women applies the same tests.
Frequently asked questions
Is the UK insurance gender pay gap closing?
It is narrowing slowly and from a high base, with clearer progress in getting women into senior roles than in the headline gap, which moves only as women reach the highest-paid positions in numbers. The financial and insurance activities group still has the largest full-time gap in the UK, well above 20% by median pay, against a national figure of 6.9% for full-time employees in April 2025.
Why is the insurance pay gap so large?
Mainly because underwriting, broking, actuarial and senior leadership roles remain heavily male, while women are concentrated in claims, operations and support. Wide bonus gaps and part-time working clustered in lower-paid roles widen it further. It reflects role mix, not unequal pay for identical work.
Does the ONS publish a separate figure for insurance?
No. The ONS groups insurance with banking and asset management as financial and insurance activities, so there is no official standalone insurance figure. For a specific insurer, use the government’s gender pay gap service, which holds each large employer’s published figures.
How do I tell if an insurer is genuinely improving?
Read its published figures across the last three or four years rather than a single snapshot. A median gap that is narrowing, a rising share of women in the top pay quartile, and a bonus gap that is being addressed are the signals that an insurer is closing its gap rather than reporting a flat number.
See how employers score for women on RecruitHer’s company gender scorecard.
This is educational information, not legal advice. Pay, rights and an employer’s obligations can vary by contract, role and circumstance. For impartial guidance contact ACAS, and look up any employer’s figures on the official gender pay gap service.
Last reviewed: November 2026