Ashurst salary 2026: the published London NQ, and when to match it

Incomes Data Research, on 11 December 2025, put the UK in-house NQ median at £44,263 and the London in-house NQ median at £57,000. London legal-adviser median sat at £66,934. Heads of legal sat close to £150,000 at the median, with some surpassing £200,000. Matching Ashurst’s published £140,000 NQ is therefore more than double IDR’s London in-house NQ, and it sits on the head-of-legal median, not on a first counsel seat.

That is the buyer’s question in one line. Matching the published London NQ is a head-of-legal cash bid, not a first counsel bid. A chief legal officer who copies the City NQ onto an NQ-to-3 PQE requisition is not “matching market.” That officer is mis-scoping the desk.

Across 750 structured interviews with London associates and counsel, 94 of 128 in-house hiring managers — general counsel, chief legal officers and heads of legal — over a 24-month window told Sartori that matching a published City NQ for a first legal-counsel seat would overpay the work relative to the file. A general counsel at a UK regulated energy network, in that same window, said they match City NQ only when the hire is competing with the firm’s own energy-transition NQs for a funded cluster seat. A head of legal for wholesale markets at a global bank said the published NQ is a conversion price for a secondee they want on payroll, not a graduate in-house salary.

IDR also cites the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings provisional release of 23 October 2025: median full-time annual earnings for solicitors and lawyers rose 10.7 percent year on year, against 4.3 percent for all full-time employees. The City NQ war is not an isolated print; the wider solicitor earnings series moved too. That still does not license a general counsel to copy a £140,000 NQ onto a first in-house counsel requisition. The ACC survey, data effective 1 March 2025, found attorneys with prior law-firm experience had a median base 16 percent higher than those without — which is the premium a company is buying when it hires this firm’s NQ into a senior in-house seat, and which it is wasting when it pays that premium for a graduate commercial file.

Who actually writes the check. The firm’s financial-services sector page lists lenders and borrowers, issuers and investors, regulated institutions, nonbank lenders and specialty finance as the client types on Global Loans, Global Markets, capital markets and financial regulation. The energy and infrastructure page lists sponsors, utilities, producers, developers, public-sector bodies, contractors, equity investors, debt financiers and large energy users. Private capital is written as sponsors, investors, lenders and portfolio companies. Technology is written as platform and cloud providers and the businesses that depend on them. Those are the in-house desks — GC of a mid-market PE house, project counsel at a cluster sponsor, head of legal for wholesale at a bank, privacy counsel at a platform company — that can clear City qualification cash. They are not the NQ legal-counsel intake at an unregulated mid-market company.

The Association of Corporate Counsel / Empsight 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey, data effective 1 March 2025 across 1,632 US respondents, puts median Attorney total cash at $160,000 (base $148,000), Senior Attorney at $201,000, Expert Attorney at $227,000, Associate General Counsel at $245,000, Deputy GC at $280,000, and GC/CLO at $279,000 base / $358,000 total cash. CLOs at companies with revenue above $5 billion have median total target compensation exceeding $1 million. Bloomberg’s June 2025 dollar gloss of the Ashurst NQ (~$190,000) therefore sits above ACC Attorney total cash and below Senior Attorney — useful for a global chief legal officer, not a substitute for IDR’s UK tables.

Ashurst’s own results, published 23 June 2026, put FY26 revenue at £1.152 billion, up 11 percent from £1.034 billion in FY25, and PEP at £1.592 million, up 15 percent. Ten consecutive years of revenue growth; average PEP growth of 10 percent a year over that decade. The Law Gazette, the same day, recorded the same revenue and PEP and noted that pre-tax profit was not disclosed, as in prior years. Global Legal Post observed that FY25 had been +8 percent revenue and +4 percent PEP, so FY26 accelerated.

FY25, the year ended 30 April 2025, was the first year above £1 billion: revenue £1.034 billion against £961 million in FY24, PEP £1.390 million against £1.336 million. The Annual Business Report PDF snapshot is 4,300+ FTE and a 500+ FTE partners band, 30 offices, 32 lateral partner hires and 20 partner promotions. Global Legal Post, on 1 July 2025, used a different definition: more than 1,800 lawyers across 31 offices. Those labels — FTE, lawyers, partners, client-facing practitioners — measure different things on different dates.

Combination economics use a third set of labels. Intent on 17 November 2025 spoke of 3,000 lawyers and US$2.7 billion in revenue. Partner votes on 13 April 2026 spoke of approximately US$2.8 billion and around 3,000 lawyers. Close on 28 June 2026 spoke of 52 offices across 20 countries and regions, over 950 partners and 3,500 client-facing practitioners, with hubs in Seattle, London, Sydney and New York. Global Legal Post, on 29 June 2026, put Ashurst’s 1,600 lawyers against Perkins Coie’s just-under $1.3 billion in 2025 revenue and $1.9 million PEP, per Law.com figures that paper cited. Wait for a unification memo. Do not invent a midpoint between the UK-legacy NQ and a US-scale number the combined firm has not published.

UK Disputes, Investigations & Advisory grew 21 percent in FY26. Corporate Transactions grew 15 percent globally. Finance, Funds & Restructuring grew 15 percent; UK Financial Regulatory grew 18 percent; Global Loans & Global Markets grew 13 percent. Six priority industries — Banks, Energy, Infrastructure, Private Capital, Real Estate, Technology — exceeded an 85 percent-of-revenue target in the 2027 strategy. That industry list is also the in-house buyer list on this page.

Companies House OC330252 is now named ASHURST PERKINS COIE UK LLP. The name changed on 25 June 2026. Last accounts made up to 30 April 2025; a filing on 18 August 2026 shortened the current accounting period from 30 April 2027 to 31 December 2026, consistent with a move toward calendar-year combined reporting. Legal Business, on 14 January 2026, reported FY25 partner capital contributions rising from £3.1 million to £7.6 million, and payments to former members from £2.1 million to £4.9 million. Those are member-capital figures, not PEP, and they are the closest public window onto how the partnership funded itself in the last standalone accounts.

Practice demand that actually added London partners in the combination window, anonymized to title: a corporate / private equity partner on 4 November 2025, with seven new UK Corporate partners in two years via promotion and hire; a real estate litigation partner on 1 July 2026, the ninth London lateral since the 17 November 2025 intent announcement; a tax partner on 11 August 2026, financial-services tax. Chambers UK 2026 ranks 48 departments and 103 individuals, with Projects: Mainly Domestic in Band 1. Those labels tell a general counsel which desks are expensive to hire against.

FY25 practice prints that did not repeat in the FY26 release at the same grain: UK Financial Regulatory revenue grew 34 percent that year; Real Estate as an industry line grew 49 percent; Digital Economy grew 21 percent; US Disputes, Investigations & Advisory grew 35 percent. Harvey generative AI was rolled out in June 2024 to all 4,300-plus people. The FY26 results also recorded the first African office, in Casablanca. A chief legal officer reading PEP as a hiring signal should read those lines as demand, not as a partner drawing.