Vanguard pay in the UK: $830k+ for your boss, $160k for you
Vanguard is one of the more interesting asset management firms in the world. Owned by its own funds, it is famously lean, offering mainly minimalist, passive index funds to its mainly retail customer base. Despite that, it has almost as many employees as rival Blackrock – and a startling pay disparity.
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2025 Regulatory filings from Vanguard Asset Management, Ltd – the firm’s main UK subsidiary – shed some light on who exactly is earning what. In short: the firm’s leadership is making great money. Everyone else, however, is lagging.
Average pay in 2025 at Vanguard Asset Management Ltd. (VAM) was £137k ($182k). Around two-thirds of that – £93k ($123k) – came from salaries, and a third – £44k ($58k) – came from bonuses. But beneath those numbers was a significant disparity.
VAM’s 17 members of senior management earned salaries of approximately £232k ($308k) and bonuses of £448k ($594k) on average that same year. Total compensation for this small group was therefore £680k ($902k), on average, in 2025.
Pay for the firm’s 14 non-management MRTs wasn’t far behind. MRTs are a regulatory invention that refer to people whose “professional activities have a material impact on the risk profile of the firm,” per the UK’s FCA. VAM MRTs earned salaries of £237k ($314k) and bonuses of £390k ($517k) on average in 2025, for total compensation of £627k ($832k).
Things were not so good for the remaining 1,085 VAM employees who were neither senior managers nor MRTs. These people, who represented 97% of the firm's UK workforce, earned average salaries of just £89k ($118k) and average bonuses of just £33k ($44k), for total compensation of just £122k ($160k), on average in 2025.
It’s a significant disparity. For comparison, the average employee at Goldman Sachs International, the US bank’s UK subsidiary, earned $963k (£726k) after a strong 2025, which was around 57% of what the firm’s MRTs earned in the UK in that same year. At VAM, the equivalent figure is just 21%.
Vanguard had a pretty successful 2025 in the UK, according to recently-released figures from Vanguard Asset Services, a subsidiary of the firm, on companies house. Its UK-domiciled assets under management (AuM) was £106bn ($141bn) at the end of the year, up from £88bn ($117bn) at the start, an increase of around 20%. Revenue was up less dramatically, by just 6%, but profit was up more significantly, by around 32%.
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