Medicine & Dentistry is the highest paying degree subject in the UK: graduates of the typical course earn £52,500 five years after graduating, against £31,500 across all subjects. Mathematics (£41,000) and Veterinary Science (£40,500) come next.
The highest paying degrees in the UK share a few common features. They are numerate, with maths or statistics at their core. They teach skills employers struggle to find. And many lead straight into a profession with a structured pay ladder that rises year after year.
Their graduates mostly go into four areas: finance and banking, software and technology, engineering, and medicine and healthcare. Those are the sectors where starting salaries are highest and keep rising for years after graduating.
Medicine & Dentistry tops the table: graduates of the typical course earn £52,500 five years after graduating, against £31,500 across all subjects. But where you study matters as much as what: within every subject, the best-paying courses earn far more than the subject's median, as the chart below shows.
Data last updated · HESA Discover Uni
| Subject | After 5 years | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Medicine & Dentistry | £52,500 |
| 2 | Mathematics | £41,000 |
| 3 | Veterinary Science | £40,500 |
| 4 | Economics | £38,500 |
| 5 | Engineering | £38,500 |
| 6 | Physics & Chemistry | £36,000 |
| 7 | Computer Science | £35,000 |
| 8 | Architecture, Building & Planning | £33,500 |
| 9 | Business & Accounting | £32,500 |
| 10 | Nursing, Pharmacy & Allied Health | £32,500 |
Ranked by salary five years after graduating. Each figure is the median of each course's own median graduate salary (HESA Discover Uni). Salaries 15 months after graduating come from the Graduate Outcomes survey; three and five years on, from LEO tax data. Click a subject for its highest paying courses.
| Subject | After 15 months | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Medicine & Dentistry | £37,000 |
| 2 | Veterinary Science | £34,000 |
| 3 | Engineering | £31,500 |
| 4 | Mathematics | £30,000 |
| 5 | Economics | £30,000 |
| 6 | Physics & Chemistry | £30,000 |
| 7 | Education & Teaching | £30,000 |
| 8 | Computer Science | £29,000 |
| 9 | Nursing, Pharmacy & Allied Health | £28,500 |
| 10 | Architecture, Building & Planning | £28,000 |
Ranked by salary 15 months after graduating, the earliest point HESA measures.
A median salary is one number standing in for hundreds of courses. This chart plots every course individually, so you can see the spread behind it: how tightly courses in a subject cluster together, or how far apart the best- and worst-paying ones sit.
Each dot is one course's own median graduate salary (not individual graduates' pay), from the HESA Discover Uni dataset. Courses with a cohort too small to report are excluded, and postgrad/top-up/alternate-entry courses are excluded site-wide. Figures compare courses, not people.
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Each dot is one course, positioned by its salary along the horizontal axis (never shifted by more than one dot-width). Vertical position means nothing. It only spreads dots apart so they don't overlap. Hover a dot for details, or click it to open that course's page.
| Course | Institution | Subject | Salary |
|---|
Medicine & Dentistry. Graduates of the typical course earn £52,500 five years after graduating, the most of any subject, followed by Mathematics (£41,000) and Veterinary Science (£40,500). The single best-paying course is Economics at the University of Cambridge, whose graduates earn a median £89,500 five years on.
Medicine & Dentistry: graduates of the typical course earn £37,000 15 months after graduating, ahead of Veterinary Science (£34,000) and Engineering (£31,500).
Of the 10 highest paying subjects, Medicine & Dentistry; Veterinary Science; Architecture, Building & Planning; Business & Accounting; and Nursing, Pharmacy & Allied Health don't usually ask for A-level maths. Medicine, dentistry and veterinary science ask for chemistry, and usually biology, instead. Requirements vary between universities, so check each course's entry requirements.
Often, yes. In Computer Science, the best-paying course (Computer Science at the University of Cambridge) pays £88,500 after five years, against £35,000 for the typical course: a gap of £53,500, bigger than the £27,500 between the typical course in the best- and worst-paying subjects (Medicine & Dentistry and Art, Design, Music & Drama).
Salaries 15 months after graduating come from HESA's Graduate Outcomes survey; salaries three and five years on come from Longitudinal Education Outcomes (LEO) data, which links graduates to their tax records. Each figure is a course's median, published by HESA through Discover Uni, and courses with too few graduates to report are left out. Subject figures here are the median across each subject's courses, so they compare courses, not individual graduates.