Sustainability consultant salary UK

No official statistic is published for the job title sustainability consultant.

The closest official figure is the Home Office going rate for SOC 2152, Environment professionals, a group that names environmental consultants and sustainability officers: £37,200, the median of ONS earnings data on a 37.5-hour week.

The professional bodies’ own surveys sit around and above it: ISEP’s 2025 report puts its Graduate members’ average at £37,069 and its Fellows’ at £91,911, and IEMA’s 2022 survey of 1,190 UK members found a full-time average of £47,570.

For comparison, the ONS median for all full-time employees was £39,039 in April 2025.

No official source publishes a London figure for sustainability consultants.

ONS publishes earnings by region and local authority for all employees, not by occupation within London, and the going rate is a single UK-wide figure.

What the Greater London Authority does publish is demand: green roles were 6.5% of all London job adverts between April 2025 and March 2026, up from 4.2% in 2019.

Both are careers guides rather than earnings statistics.

The National Careers Service’s closest profiles are environmental consultant and corporate responsibility and sustainability practitioner, which set out routes in and progression.

Prospects publishes its own guide ranges on its sustainability consultant and environmental consultant profiles and describes them as a guide.

This page benchmarks against ONS data and the professional bodies’ surveys, which publish who they asked and when.

No official statistic is broken down by seniority.

The nearest evidence is the professional bodies’ grade averages, which track experience: in IEMA’s 2022 survey full-time Practitioner members averaged £49,614, Full members £58,656 and Fellows £79,369, and ISEP’s 2025 report put Fellows at £91,911.

These are averages of self-selected members, not a sample of every senior consultant.

Environmental consultants are named in SOC 2020 unit group 2152, Environment professionals, so the Home Office going rate of £37,200 covers them: a median derived from ONS earnings data, on a 37.5-hour week, for the whole occupation rather than any grade within it.

No official statistic or professional-body survey reports ESG consultant as a separate job title.

ESG work sits inside the same surveys as sustainability and environmental work, and whether an ESG adviser is coded as an environment professional (SOC 2152, going rate £37,200) or a management consultant (SOC 2431, going rate £50,200) depends on the work the job involves.

The professional bodies’ surveys say chartered members earn more.

IEMA’s 2022 survey found CEnv holders averaged £56,837, which it described as significantly more than members who are not CEnv registered.

The IES reported a median of £55,180 for CEnv holders in its 2021 survey, 38% above non-chartered members, and said its 2023 survey showed a median 24% higher for members holding CSci and CEnv.

Chartership comes with seniority, so part of the difference is experience rather than the charter itself.

ISEP’s 2026 report records a 9% gap, compared with 14.7% in its 2025 report.

These are different survey samples, including non-UK respondents in 2026, and do not establish a change for the same people.

The survey is not a statutory employer gender pay gap report.

No official statistic or professional-body survey publishes a figure for either job title.

Both fall within the sustainability and environmental roles the ISEP and IES surveys cover, and within SOC 2152 where the work is environmental; use those benchmarks and treat a job-title figure without a stated sample as unsupported.

No official or professional-body series publishes sustainability day rates.

ONS earnings statistics cover employees, not the self-employed, and the day-rate indices that do exist measure other markets.

The useful comparison is arithmetic: an independent’s day rate multiplied by the days actually billed, less the pension, holiday, insurance, software and unpaid selling time an employer would otherwise fund.

No. The going rate for SOC 2152 is £37,200, but GOV.UK says the minimum salary for a Skilled Worker visa is whichever is the highest of £41,700 a year and the going rate for the job, with lower figures only in specified cases such as extensions.

For a sustainability role coded to SOC 2152 the general minimum of £41,700 is therefore the higher test, so the going rate is a benchmark for the occupation, not a pay floor.

They measure different things.

ISEP’s 2025 report records a 14.7% gap in the average pay of its members.

ONS reports a gender pay gap of 6.9% among full-time employees across all UK jobs in April 2025, down from 7.1% in 2024, measured as the difference in median hourly earnings excluding overtime.

One is a member survey and the other a national sample, so the two numbers should not be subtracted from each other.

Add what an employer funds on top of the salary, then divide by the days you will really bill.

An employee is entitled to at least 5.6 weeks of paid holiday, the legal minimum employer pension contribution under automatic enrolment is 3%, and statutory sick pay is paid by the employer; an independent funds all of those, plus insurance, software and unpaid selling time.

The calculator on this page does the sum with your own inputs and uses no market day rate.

IEMA’s 2022 survey recorded an average of £54,601 for members in sustainability or environmental manager roles, a category IEMA noted was an open code outside the ONS classification.

No official statistic reports sustainability manager as a separate title, and the survey is four years old.

No official statistic reports the title.

The nearest evidence is the professional bodies’ top-grade averages: ISEP’s 2025 report puts its Fellows at £91,911 on average, and the same report found 52% of respondents with a head-of job title are Chartered Environmentalists.

Those are averages of self-selected members, not a sample of every head of sustainability.

No source publishes an hourly figure for the job title.

The Home Office table gives the going rate for environment professionals, SOC 2152, as £19.08 an hour, and for management consultants, SOC 2431, as £25.74, both derived from median ASHE data on a 37.5-hour week.

ONS reports median hourly pay excluding overtime of £19.67 for all full-time employees in April 2025.

The three figures use different bases, so read them as separate numbers rather than a ranking.

No official statistic is published for graduate sustainability consultants.

ISEP’s 2025 report puts the average of its Graduate members at £37,069, which it says equals the average for the whole UK workforce, and IEMA’s 2022 survey recorded £30,547 for Graduate members.

Both are averages of members who answered, and the careers guides’ ranges are not used here because they state no sample.

Sustainability officers are a sub-group of SOC 2152, Environment professionals, so the Home Office going rate of £37,200 applies to them.

No official statistic or professional-body survey reports sustainability analyst, advisor or specialist as a separate job title, so a figure quoted for one without a named publisher and sample is unsupported.

No official source publishes pay by employer for this job.

ONS earnings tables are broken down by age, region, occupation and industry.

What is published by employer is the statutory gender pay gap report, for employers with 250 or more employees, which shows how pay is distributed across the firm rather than what any one role earns.

Salary figures for named firms on job boards come from user submissions or job adverts, so this page does not repeat them.

The official evidence is mixed by period.

ONS puts UK green employment at 652,100 full-time equivalents in 2024, up 27.8% on 2015 but down 10,800 on 2023, and the Greater London Authority found green roles were 6.5% of London job adverts in the year to March 2026.

The FCA’s PS26/19 creates dated reporting work for listed companies from 1 January 2027, and no published statistic yet shows what that has done to pay.

ONS publishes earnings by four-digit occupation in its Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings tables, and environmental consultants sit in SOC 2020 unit group 2152.

This page uses the Home Office going rate for that group, £37,200, because the going rate is derived from the same ASHE medians and states its basis.

Read the 2152 row in the ASHE tables yourself if you need the median and percentiles, and quote the table and year.

ASHE is annual: the 2025 results were released on 23 October 2025, so check the ONS release page for a newer bulletin before quoting a figure as current.

The Home Office going rates took effect on 22 July 2025.

ISEP’s 2026 survey was still open on 30 September 2026, and this page will take its results from ISEP’s State of the Profession page when they appear.