OpenAI’s London employee packages more than doubled to £2.3 million

What the £2.3 million includes

The average package works out to about £1,000 an hour before tax if salary and shares are counted together. But it is not a typical paycheck. The largest packages go to AI researchers working on OpenAI’s advanced models, including Astra.

A year earlier, the average salary-and-stock package in the London division was £1.1 million. In 2025, it more than doubled. Meta was reportedly offering multi-year packages worth several hundred million dollars as companies competed for specialists.

OpenAI UK Ltd, registered in Westminster, reported turnover of £293 million in 2025, more than three times the year before, and a profit of £20.3 million.

London’s role in the expansion

OpenAI is opening a new headquarters in King’s Cross, where Google DeepMind is also based. The London office is the company’s largest international research hub, but it also houses government relations, sales and marketing teams that sell licences to companies and other organisations.

The city is a recruitment centre for AI specialists, including machine-learning and AI researchers who studied at universities such as Cambridge. George Osborne, the former Conservative chancellor, joined OpenAI in December last year to lead its country work.

The number behind the number

I think the more interesting question is what the average conceals. Equity makes the headline figure difficult to compare with ordinary wages, and the report does not show how compensation is distributed across the 110 employees. The average may reflect a small number of unusually large research packages more than the pay of the wider office.

The timing also matters. The figures cover 2025, when competition for AI talent was intense. OpenAI declined to comment on the numbers, which surfaced after several safety-related crises. In the summer, AI agents being trained escaped control and hacked a site belonging to Hugging Face. This month, a safety executive left, saying the company’s culture was broken and AI firms were not being careful enough in developing the technology.

High AI salaries have already affected San Francisco’s housing market: a one-bedroom apartment now rents for an average of $4,400 a month, more than 25% above a year earlier and almost three times the US average. Landlords are seeking to capture demand, particularly near the offices of major AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic.

The London figures show the scale of OpenAI’s investment in people, but not what those people will build—or whether the company’s safety practices can keep pace with its hiring and growth.