UK Sustainability Hiring Trends 2026

The Hays Salary & Recruiting Trends Guide 2026 88 reports that 93% of employers faced skills shortages in the last twelve months, from 5,100-plus UK respondents. Two qualifiers travel with that number and are routinely dropped: it is 93% of employers, and the guide is cross-sector, not sustainability-specific. It is a self-selected survey of Hays' own marketing database with no published sampling frame, weighting or fieldwork dates, and the guide sits behind a lead-capture form, so only the landing-page headline is independently checkable. Set beside it the audited figure from the same company. Hays plc's Sustainability Report FY25 records net fee income of £972.4m against £1,113.6m the year before, and 257,900 roles filledagainst 282,700 — down 12.7% and 8.8%, with the CEO citing “a material lengthening of ‘time-to-hire’, and lower placement volumes”. A tight candidate market and a shrinking recruitment market are not contradictory, but one of these numbers is an audited financial statement and the other is a marketing survey. They are not equal evidence.UK SRS S1 and UK SRS S2 are published and voluntary. The FCA has proposed mandatory UK SRS S2 for issuers listed in UKLR 6, 16 and 22, for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027, but CP26/5 closed on 20 March 2026 and no Policy Statement had been published as at August 2026. Hiring against that is anticipation, not compliance. Technical roles like ESG Reporting Manager and Carbon Manager face acute shortages due to regulatory complexity and methodology requirements.

The two figures the market treats as the UK sustainability salary benchmark — a £123,816 director average and a £63,741 manager average — are widely attributed to the OneStop ESG Sustainability Salary Survey 2026 87. They are not its data.Its own methodology note says the UK figures are cross-referenced from the Shirley Parsons 2025 HSEQ & Sustainability Salary Survey and the Hays 2026 guide, and the two numbers sit in the sentence immediately after that disclosure. Follow the chain and it thins at every step. The survey is 2,147 respondents across 42 countries, of whom 28% are European — roughly 601 people for an entire continent — and the UK sub-sample is never stated. Where a role and region intersect below n=30, the methodology says ranges are “informed by supplementary market data” from PayScale, Glassdoor, Salary.com, Comparably and ZipRecruiter. Shirley Parsons' own survey 89 is 1,000-plus self-selected respondents with no published method, and its population is HSEQ and sustainability combined — health, safety, environment, quality and sustainability — so it is not a sustainability salary survey at all. Stacking recruiter surveys creates the appearance of corroboration when they are quoting each other. The only official UK anchor is not a sustainability figure: ONS classifies these roles under SOC 2020 unit group 2152, Environment professionals, and the Home Office publishes the ASHE median for that group as a Skilled Worker going rate of £37,200 (£19.08 an hour) — a median, on a 37.5-hour week, from ASHE 2024 data applied from 22 July 2025, and a whole-occupation median rather than a seniority level. Our comprehensive salary guide details sector-specific trends and role progression benchmarks across the UK market.

Hays' 2026 guide 88reports that 34% of employees use AI regularly at work. Note what that is and is not: a cross-sector, self-selected survey of Hays' own database, not a measurement of sustainability teams, and not sustainability-specific.ESG Analysts increasingly require AI competency alongside traditional research skills. Carbon Managers use AI for emissions calculation and scenario modelling. This technology integration creates hybrid competency requirements combining regulatory expertise with digital fluency, further constraining available talent pools and driving specialist recruitment demand.