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Young workers face place-based pay penalty, study warns

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Workers in the early stages of their career face a pay penalty for doing the same job in a different part of England, according to new analysis that unveils "stark and persistent" regional wage inequalities. An average employee in London earns nearly twice as much as the equivalent in Liskeard, in Cornwall, research by the Resolution Foundation showed.

The analysis suggests that higher wages are not driven by the people who work there but by the place in which they work. This leads to a full-time worker early on in their career suffering a 5 per cent "place-based pay penalty", according to the think tank. This could be worth about £1,300 a year if they move from a typical high-paying jobs market, such as Harrogate, to a lowpaying one, such as Dudley. The study analysed earnings data spanning all early-career workers in England, covering more than 11 million individuals.

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