The pay pot is fixed. The market is not.

Rent settlements decide what you can spend. The labour market decides what you have to. Housing association people teams have spent the last few years standing between those two facts, usually with a pay pot agreed before anyone knew what a housing officer would cost by autumn.

We have benchmarked housing roles every year since 2004. Not adjacent roles, not "public sector" as a category: neighbourhood and income officers, repairs and asset management, development, care and support, housing management, and the executive team.

What is specific about housing pay, and what most data misses

• Pension is the differential nobody benchmarks. Two landlords advertising the same salary can be five or six per cent apart on total cost once the employer contribution is in, and legacy defined-benefit exposure means the gap between comparators is often wider than the gap in base pay. Benchmarking base and ignoring pension prices the smaller half of the problem, so we cost both.
• You compete in three markets at once. Trades against private contractors, care staff against local authorities and private providers, finance and development against commercial property. One "housing sector" average tells you nothing useful about any of them.
• Care and support pay has its own gravity. National Living Wage uprating on 1 April compresses your bottom grades every year, and the Employment Rights Act 2025 creates a Social Care Negotiating Body that will change the floor again.
• Real Living Wage accreditation changes the shape of your structure, not just its floor. The Real Living Wage is the voluntary rate set by the Living Wage Foundation, announced each October with an implementation deadline the following spring. It is not the same thing as the statutory National Living Wage, and the two move independently.
• Executive pay is public and contested. Inside Housing's annual chief executive survey is a league table, not a benchmark, and it is what your board will read.

How we help

Benchmarking for the roles you cannot price off a generic survey, costed on total employment cost rather than base alone. Grading structures that hold across a landlord and a care arm without two incompatible pay systems. Pay gap reporting and equality action plans, which become mandatory from spring 2027 subject to legislation. And a defensible executive range for the remuneration committee, which is the audience the word defensible is really for.

Housing associations we work with

Southern Housing, Moat, Accent, Thrive Homes, Fairhive, Coastal Housing Group, Selwood Housing, ISHA, Saffron Housing, HYELM, Orwell, Peter Bedford Housing Association, Two Saints.

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