What the job costs #
Salary is the part everyone quotes and the smallest part of the decision. Here is the employment cost at the national median, using the rates in force for the 2026 to 2027 tax year.
£28,532
Median salary
ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), SOC 4121
£32,731
Employment cost a year
Salary, employer NI and minimum pension
£19
Per hour worked
37.5 hour week, 46.4 working weeks
| Item | A year | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Median salary | £28,532 | ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), SOC 4121 |
| Employer National Insurance | £3,530 | 15 per cent above £5,000 |
| Minimum workplace pension | £669 | 3 per cent of qualifying earnings |
| Employment cost | £32,731 | About £19 an hour on a 37.5 hour week |
Recruitment, equipment, software seats, training and cover for holiday and sickness all sit on top, and they vary too much between businesses to put a number on here.
If you want to run your own figures, the true cost of an employee tool does this with your salary, hours and on costs.
What the week is actually made of #
Here is the job as it usually runs in a business, split by whether the work follows a fixed pattern or needs a person to decide something. This split is our analysis, not a survey, and your version of the role will differ.
Runs to a pattern (5 of 12)
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Send the aged debt chase emails on cycle daily
Trigger, template and escalation ladder are all defined.
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Allocate incoming payments against invoices daily
Reference and amount usually decide it.
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Produce the weekly aged debt report and cash forecast weekly
Same query, same layout, every week.
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Issue statements of account monthly
Generate and send on a fixed date.
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Reconcile the sales ledger at month end monthly
Structured matching against a checklist.
Needs a person (7 of 12)
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Telephone customers about overdue invoices daily
Tone, timing and how hard to push are judgement.
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Agree payment plans with customers in difficulty weekly
A commercial decision about risk and relationship.
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Run credit checks on new accounts and set limits weekly
A score informs it, a person decides it.
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Put accounts on stop and take them off again weekly
Stopping a customer has consequences the system cannot weigh.
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Unblock invoice disputes that are holding up payment daily
Usually a problem somewhere else in the business.
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Prepare files for a collection agency or legal action monthly
Deciding when to escalate is a commercial call.
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Flag likely bad debt to the finance lead monthly
A view on whether money will ever arrive.
What to do before you advertise #
The question is not whether to hire. It is what the person will be doing on a Tuesday afternoon in March. Two things are worth doing first, and both take less effort than writing the advert:
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Count the week you are about to buy
Write down the jobs this role would pick up, how long each takes and how often it happens. The cost of admin time calculator adds it up and puts a cost on it.
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Separate the pattern from the judgement
If most of the hours sit in the first list above, a hire will absorb the pressure rather than remove it, and the same pressure returns when the business grows again.
Plenty of businesses do both: automate the repeated half, then hire someone to do the half that needs a person, often part time or at a level that keeps them interested. That is a better job than the one the advert usually describes.
Where this role usually sits #
This job turns up most often in wholesale , logistics and haulage , recruitment , trades and installers and accountancy , and the admin around it looks different in each.
A note on the pay figure #
£28,532 is the median for full time employees in SOC 4121, Credit controllers, from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, 2025 (provisional). ONS publishes a coefficient of variation with every figure, and this one is 5.2 per cent, which ONS treats as reliable.
It is a national figure covering every employer size and region. What a specific business pays depends on where it is, how specialised the job is, and what else is on offer nearby.