Welcome to the Design Truth Salary Guide for 2025.

Year 4.

Four years of incremental salary increases not even in line with inflation, four years closer to being considered a designer too old to play this young persons game, four years of trying to work out why our digital cousins keep using that term product design, four years of us pratting about.

Wyn’s nearly had two kids since we started doing this.

Ultimately, we all want to earn a little more. Deep down, if your boss that runs this little design consultancy could pay you more - they probably would. Are they able to charge a higher day rate to clients? Probably not in this climate - salaries really are a nuanced conversation.

Our guide, we hope is a mechanism in which you can have that chat. A way in which we can adjust the status quo is transparency - is to have that dialogue, that openness and honestly that reference point to make sure we pay fairly.

Many would argue salaries are low in industrial design when you compare to other creative disciplines. We do not disagree, but it is not for Design Truth to change that over night.

If anything, when considering inflation - industrial designers in the UK are getting a pay cut - not an increase.

When you have this information we hope we can realistically help one or two designers get that little boost of they deserve.

Our salary guide has been downloaded more than 50,000 times. Pretty bonkers really.

We continue to have aspirations on this becoming a global industrial design salary guide - for this to happen we do need more data to work with.

This requires you filling out the survey which you can find if you keep scrolling - we will leave that available for the foreseeable.

Due to significant data entry, salaries for those in Australia has been included for 2025.

To freelancers - we will post something separately in relation to day rates, but as a general rule of thumb start at £350 a day and go from there.

If you completely missed it, the link to the Design Truth 2025 Salary Guide is at the top of this landing page.

questions / hello@designtruth.co.uk