Seven years of mandatory gender pay gap reporting under the Equality Act 2010 (Gender Pay Gap Information) Regulations 2017 have produced a visible narrowing in headline salary figures for UK employers. Bonus pay has followed a different trajectory. New analysis by Brightmine, drawing on data from more than 1.4 million employees across 1,190 organisations in July 2026, finds that women receive £2,380 less in bonus pay per year than men - a 44% gap that widens substantially with age and seniority, and that sits largely outside the scrutiny most reward teams apply to base pay.

The Brightmine dataset puts concrete numbers on a concern the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has flagged repeatedly in its annual Reward Management Survey: bonus scheme design is among the least examined levers in pay equity, and the disparities embedded in eligibility rules and discretionary payout decisions can exceed the base-salary differentials that dominate annual reporting cycles. The data published this summer suggests the gap inside reward budgets is not a rounding error. It is structural.

The £2,380 gap in one number

The average bonus for a male employee in the Brightmine dataset was £5,442, compared with £3,062 for women - a 44% gender bonus gap. The disparity operates on two levels simultaneously: men are 1.5 times more likely than women to receive a bonus in the first place, and when bonuses are paid, they are paid at a higher value. Both effects compound.

Only 14% of staff received a bonus in the period, unchanged from July 2025. The overall average payment was £4,572. This is not a story about reward budgets becoming more generous or more widely distributed. The total coverage rate has held flat. The story is about how the existing pool is allocated, and across which groups.

Sheila Attwood, HR insights and data lead at Brightmine, noted that while overall average bonus rates had increased, the gap between women remained stark. That framing - stark, not marginal - matters for how reward committees read the data.

The gap grows with your career

The most significant finding in the Brightmine analysis is not the aggregate gap but its trajectory over time. At age 56, men in the dataset received an average bonus of £8,817, compared with £3,769 for women - a difference of more than £5,000 in a single year, at a single career stage. The gap does not stay flat as careers progress; it accelerates.

Seniority produces an analogous pattern. Directors received an average bonus of £63,672, equivalent to 37% of basic salary. Non-director staff received an average of £1,919, or 5% of salary. Bonus value is heavily concentrated at senior levels, and senior levels are where women remain underrepresented in most UK sectors. The concentration effect and the representation deficit reinforce each other: the higher the payout ceiling on a scheme, the more the demographic profile of who reaches that level determines aggregate outcomes.

Sheila Attwood observed that the divide becomes especially pronounced as employees age, suggesting that differences in progression, seniority and access to higher-value incentive schemes may compound throughout people's careers.

The accumulation dynamic Attwood identifies is worth unpacking. The bonus gap at 56 is not one decision - it is the aggregated result of many earlier ones: who was promoted into schemes with higher payout ceilings, who was placed in a business unit where the plan consistently paid out, who received a discretionary top-up at year-end review. The High Pay Centre, which publishes annual analysis of executive pay concentration in the UK, has consistently noted that the senior-level bonus pool is the single largest driver of total compensation inequality across the workforce - and that transparency on how that pool is allocated remains limited relative to its scale.

Finance and professional services carry the widest gaps

Sector shapes the magnitude of the gap significantly. In finance, men received £6,120 more on average than women in bonuses. In professional and business services, the sectoral gap reached £7,062. These are industries where variable pay can represent a substantial proportion of total annual compensation, so a disparity of this size translates directly into thousands of pounds of lost earnings for women working in them over a career span.

The Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ONS ASHE) consistently shows that finance and insurance, alongside professional and scientific services, carry the highest average bonus payments as a share of total pay among UK sectors. That concentration of bonus value in sectors with persistent gender gaps is part of why the aggregate 44% figure persists even as base-salary gaps in other industries narrow.

For anyone considering a move into or within these sectors, the headline base salary figure represents only part of the compensation picture. The bonus structure - its eligibility criteria, its performance metrics, and the degree of managerial discretion in payout decisions - can have a larger effect on five-year take-home earnings than a 5% difference in base salary.

For employees: what to ask before you sign

If you are negotiating an offer in a bonus-heavy sector, the bonus clause merits as much scrutiny as the salary line. ACAS (Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service) guidance on employment contracts notes that discretionary bonus terms, when poorly defined, provide limited legal protection if an employer decides not to pay. Knowing what you are agreeing to before you sign is materially different from discovering it at year-end review.

A set of concrete questions worth raising at offer stage:

• What was the average bonus payout for someone at my grade last year, and what was the distribution range?
• Is any portion of the bonus contractual, or is the entire amount fully discretionary?
• Which performance metrics feed into the calculation - individual, team-level, or company-level?
• Does the scheme include a cap, a floor, or a minimum service period before eligibility?
• How is the pool divided between the senior leadership team and the broader workforce?

If the answer to most of these is that it depends on the manager, treat the bonus as a possibility rather than a sum you can plan around financially. Once in role, benchmarking your total compensation - base salary plus bonus plus benefits - against verified market data for your sector and seniority level is one of the more useful annual exercises available. Salary transparency at the bonus level remains patchy in UK public reporting, which makes peer comparison data particularly valuable.

For HR: the audit your pay-gap report is not doing

UK gender pay gap reporting, required under s.78 of the Equality Act 2010 and implemented through the 2017 Regulations for employers with 250 or more employees, captures bonus pay as part of mandatory disclosure. However, the required figures are aggregate percentages: mean and median bonus gaps expressed at organisation level. They describe the shape of a disparity; they rarely identify the mechanisms producing it. That gap between what reporting requires and what analysis needs is where the Brightmine findings are most instructive.

Sheila Attwood's recommendation is direct: employers should examine bonus outcomes alongside their wider pay-gap data and assess who receives awards, their relative value, and how this varies by gender, age and seniority.

A practical starting point is to separate the two distinct questions the dataset raises. First: who is in the scheme? If men are 1.5 times more likely to receive a bonus, then either eligibility rules or the manager-discretion layer - or both - are producing that outcome, and both can be audited. Second: for employees who are already in the scheme, how do payouts vary within grade band? Distribution analysis within a single grade reveals where discretion is doing the most work, far more clearly than any aggregate figure across bands will.

The age dimension is the one most reward teams underweight in their current analysis. If a 44% gap becomes a £5,000 differential at age 56, the scheme is not operating in a gender-neutral way at senior levels. It is compounding earlier decisions about career progression, business unit placement, and access to schemes with higher payout ceilings. Auditing bonus outcomes by age band - alongside gender - exposes where that compounding is occurring and at what career stage it begins to accelerate.

The CIPD's Reward Management Survey, which tracks bonus design and pay-equity practice among its approximately 160,000 UK members, has noted that formal bonus audits by demographic remain relatively uncommon despite growing disclosure pressure. The combination of Brightmine's findings and the regulatory context under the Equality Act 2010 gives reward committees a strong basis to commission that analysis proactively, rather than wait for it to surface in an Employment Tribunal claim or an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) inquiry.

Attwood concludes that greater transparency and regular analysis can help organisations identify where disparities emerge and determine whether their reward practices are operating fairly.

Key takeaways

• Women in the Brightmine dataset receive £2,380 less in bonus pay per year than men, reflecting a 44% gap on average bonuses of £5,442 (men) versus £3,062 (women).
• Men are 1.5 times more likely to receive a bonus at all, so the gap is a combination of eligibility access and payout value - not just the latter.
• The gap widens sharply with age and seniority: a difference of more than £5,000 at age 56, and directors receive an average of £63,672 against £1,919 for non-directors.
• Finance and professional services carry the widest sectoral gaps at £6,120 and £7,062 respectively - industries where ONS ASHE data consistently shows the highest bonus concentration as a share of total pay.
• UK gender pay gap reporting under the Equality Act 2010 (s.78) discloses aggregate bonus gaps but does not require employers to report the eligibility rates, within-band distributions, or age-cohort breakdowns that would identify the mechanisms driving them.
• For candidates in bonus-heavy sectors, scrutinising the bonus clause at offer stage - including contractual versus discretionary status and ACAS guidance on what limited protection fully discretionary bonuses provide - is as important as negotiating the base salary line. For HR teams, the audit needs to cover both who enters the scheme and how payouts vary within grade, not just the headline percentage.