How Much Are Non-Executive Directors Paid in the UK?

Someone asks what your new board role pays, and you catch yourself about to say "salary" before correcting to "fee" — the words are not interchangeable, and the gap between the highest-paying boards in the country and the many that pay nothing at all is wider than almost any other line of work.

There is no single non-executive director salary in the UK, because NEDs are not employees and are not paid a salary at all. They are paid a fee, set individually by each board. The range runs from nothing (most charity trustees) to a FTSE 150 average of £82,314 a year, according to Spencer Stuart's 2025 UK Board Index — with public-sector, AIM and private-company fees typically well below that.

Key takeaways

• NEDs are paid a fee, not a salary — they hold a board office under a letter of appointment for services, not a contract of employment, which is why "fee" is the correct term.
• The average FTSE 150 non-executive director fee is £82,314 a year (2025), up 18.3% from £69,606 in 2020, according to Spencer Stuart's 2025 UK Board Index.
• The average FTSE 150 chair retainer is £452,069 — more than five times the average NED fee — according to the same survey.
• Pay outside the FTSE 150 falls sharply: a non-executive director on an NHS trust board is paid a fixed £13,000 a year, and most charity trustees are unpaid, according to NHS England and the Charity Commission respectively.
• NED fees are increasingly disclosed with a share component alongside cash, following the Financial Reporting Council's November 2025 guidance clarification — a separate development covered in full elsewhere.

Why is "non-executive director salary" the wrong term?

A non-executive director's fee is compensation paid for holding a board office, not a salary paid for employment. NEDs are engaged under a letter of appointment for services, and that single distinction is why the vocabulary — and much of the legal and tax treatment — differs from an employee's pay packet. If you are still deciding whether the role itself is right for you before worrying about what it pays, what a non-executive director actually does is worth reading first.

The practical effect shows up everywhere: a NED generally holds no employment-law protections such as redundancy pay or unfair-dismissal rights, since those rights attach to employee status, their fee is set (and can be changed) by the board's remuneration committee rather than negotiated as a package, and — as covered below — it is taxed on a different legal basis than ordinary employment income.

How much does the average non-executive director earn in the UK?

It depends heavily on the type of organisation, and the gap between segments is large. At the top end, the average non-executive director fee across the FTSE 150 reached £82,314 in 2025, up 18.3% from £69,606 five years earlier, according to Spencer Stuart's 2025 UK Board Index (30th edition).¹ The average part-time chair retainer over the same period reached £452,069 — more than five times the average NED fee, and up 9.9% from £411,406 in 2020.¹

Outside the largest listed companies, published figures thin out quickly. Reliable survey data exists for public-sector boards and charities; AIM and private-company NED fees are rarely disclosed in a comparable, named survey, so this article does not invent a figure for them rather than pass off an estimate as data.

Public-sector fees are set by policy rather than negotiated. NHS trust and foundation trust non-executive directors are paid a fixed £13,000 a year, and chairs are banded from £40,000 up to £63,300 depending on the trust's turnover, with the chair banding staged in between April 2021 and April 2022, according to NHS England.² Central government non-executive board appointments follow a similar pattern: a Cabinet Office board-member role advertised in 2024 offered £15,000 a year for around 24 days' commitment — one illustrative example, not a cross-government average, but broadly in line with the public-sector figures above.³

At the other end of the scale sits the charity sector, where a NED equivalent — the trustee — is unpaid by default. "Being a trustee is generally a voluntary role. This is what makes the charity sector unique and promotes trust and confidence in charities," according to the Charity Commission's guidance CC11.⁴ Trustees can normally claim only reasonable expenses; paying one requires specific legal authority and stays the exception rather than the norm.

Is there a standard non-executive director day rate?

Not officially. FTSE boards pay an annual retainer rather than a day rate, so there is no single published "NED day rate" the way there is for, say, interim executives. Neither Spencer Stuart nor MM&K publishes one directly — but their two figures hint at the order of magnitude when set side by side.

The average FTSE 150 NED fee is £82,314 a year, according to Spencer Stuart's 2025 UK Board Index.¹ Separately, NEDs' actual time commitment fell to a median of 15 days a year in 2023, down from a historical median of 23 days across 2009–2022, according to MM&K's Life in the Boardroom 2023/24 survey.⁵ Divide one by the other — a rough calculation across two different surveys, not an official rate — and the implied value of a FTSE 150 NED's day approaches £5,500. Treat that as a sense of scale, not a number to quote in a negotiation.

What pushes a non-executive director's fee higher?

Three things, consistently: additional responsibility, additional time, and scarcity of the skill a board is recruiting for. A committee chair — audit, remuneration, or risk — typically earns a supplement on top of the base fee, and the Senior Independent Director (SID) role, which carries extra responsibility for shareholder engagement and succession, is treated the same way. Neither role tends to be advertised at a flat published rate, since remuneration committees set these supplements individually, but their existence is precisely why the average chair retainer (£452,069) sits so far above the average NED fee (£82,314) in the same survey.¹

Time commitment is the other lever, and it has been moving in an uncomfortable direction for NEDs: workload has been rising even as, in real terms, fee growth has not always kept pace, a mismatch MM&K's own survey participants flagged directly.⁵ If you are weighing a first board offer, fee level is worth putting in context against the routes into a first non-executive role and, once you are holding more than one seat, against how income builds across a portfolio of board roles rather than from any single fee.

As Jonathan Geldart, Director General of the Institute of Directors, put it on launching the IoD's 2025 Commission into the role: "The role of non-executive directors has evolved significantly over the past two decades, and it is crucial to assess whether they are delivering the anticipated benefits to corporate governance and value creation."⁶ That evolving workload is the backdrop against which every fee conversation now happens.

Are NED fees paid in cash, shares, or both?

Mostly cash — but that is starting to shift. Following the Financial Reporting Council's clarification of its Corporate Governance Code guidance in November 2025, boards have a clearer basis to pay part of a NED's fee in shares alongside cash, provided the rationale and any restrictions are disclosed. That is a governance and independence question in its own right, not a pay-level one, and it is covered in full in our companion piece on NED pay in shares rather than repeated here.

How is non-executive director pay taxed?

Through PAYE, in most cases, because a NED is legally an "office-holder" rather than an employee, and HMRC's National Insurance rules for office-holders were extended in 2013 to bring board fees into essentially the same treatment as employment income. IR35's tax legislation was specifically extended to office-holders — including non-executive directors — from 6 April 2013, according to HMRC's Employment Status Manual.⁷ In practice, this usually means the company paying the fee deducts tax and National Insurance at source, much as it would for an employee, regardless of whether the NED also runs their own consultancy for other work.

This is a factual pointer, not tax advice. Individual circumstances — multiple directorships, expenses, a personal service company used for other work — can change what actually applies, so take advice from an accountant or tax adviser before accepting a role or assuming a particular treatment.

In summary

There is no single "non-executive director salary" in the UK, because NEDs are paid a fee for holding an office, not a salary for a job, and the fee itself varies enormously by segment — from an average of £82,314 across the FTSE 150 in 2025 down to £13,000 on an NHS trust board, and to nothing at all for most charity trustees. What moves the number is responsibility (committee chairing, the SID role) and time commitment, and how it is taxed follows office-holder rules that make professional advice worthwhile before you sign a letter of appointment.

Read next: building a portfolio career as a NED, for how these fees add up across several boards, and how to find your first non-executive role.

Notes

Footnotes

1. Spencer Stuart, 2025 UK Board Index (30th edition), "Trends." https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/uk-board-index/trends ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. NHS England, "Terms and conditions of NHS trust chairs and non-executive directors." https://www.england.nhs.uk/non-executive-opportunities/chair-non-executives-support/terms-and-conditions-nhs-trust-chairs-and-non-executive-directors/ ↩

3. Cabinet Office, Non-Executive Board Member role listing, Public Appointments Service, October 2024. https://apply-for-public-appointment.service.gov.uk/roles/8424 ↩

4. Charity Commission for England and Wales, guidance CC11, "Trustee expenses and payments," updated 25 April 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/trustee-expenses-and-payments-cc11/trustee-expenses-and-payments ↩

5. MM&K, "Life in the Boardroom 2023/24: Are Non-Executives' Workloads Increasing?," 28 November 2023. https://mm-k.com/2023/11/28/life-in-the-boardroom-2023-24-are-non-executives-workloads-increasing/ ↩ ↩²

6. Jonathan Geldart, Director General, Institute of Directors, quoted in "Institute of Directors launches Non-Executive Director Commission," Board Agenda, 11 April 2025. https://boardagenda.com/2025/04/11/institute-of-directors-launches-non-executive-director-commission/ ↩

7. HMRC, Employment Status Manual, ESM8395 (office-holders and IR35). https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/employment-status-manual/esm8395 ↩