13.2% Gap: BBC Data Show Ethnic Minority Staff Earn More in Six of Seven Salary Bands
October 8, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The BBC's 2025/26 pay-gap report shows ethnic-minority employees earn more per hour than white colleagues in six of the corporation's seven salary bands, with the gap reaching 13.2% at the lowest grade. The headline figure, which favours white staff overall, obscures the band-by-band picture the report itself contains.
In six of the BBC's seven salary bands, ethnic-minority employees earn more per hour than white colleagues, the corporation's own pay-gap report for 2025/26 shows. The gap runs from 1.3% to 13.2%.
At Band A, the lowest grade, Black, Asian and minority ethnic staff received 13.2% higher median hourly pay than white workers, BBC pay-gap data show. At Senior Leader level, the gap reached 5.3% in favour of minority staff. White workers came out ahead in exactly one of the seven bands: Band F, where they earned 0.6% more.
The BBC's headline figure tells a different story. Its overall median ethnicity pay gap stands at 0.7% in favour of white employees. That aggregate survives because white staff still hold a larger share of the highest-paying roles, which pulls up the white average across the whole workforce. Examine each band individually, and the direction reverses in all but one.
The band-by-band figures appear in the BBC's annual report on bbc.co.uk. At Band C, minority staff earned a mean of 4.7% more than white colleagues. At Band E, the mean gap was 4.5%. Senior Leaders showed the widest mean gap of all: 9.3% in favour of ethnic-minority staff, BBC pay-gap data show. The corporation said these gaps are "not as a result of unequal pay" and that audits have concluded that there is no systemic gender discrimination based on pay at the BBC.
The BBC attributes the year-on-year movement in its headline figure to workforce composition. Fewer minority employees sat in the lowest band last year than the year before, the report states, lifting the group average and narrowing the mean ethnicity gap from 3.5% to 2.0%. A BBC spokesman said: "The BBC is committed to fair and equal pay for all. We continue to monitor our pay gaps closely and do expect to see small fluctuations year-on-year."
Sir John Whittingdale, the former culture secretary who drew up the BBC's last charter in 2016, told the Telegraph the corporation "ought to be paying staff entirely on the basis of the value and merit they contribute for the job they are doing." He called for the same standard to apply across race, sexuality and gender. The BBC runs a number of mentoring and development schemes aimed at progressing the careers of diverse staff and has adopted a 50:20:14:25 Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Strategy with targets for gender, ethnicity, disability and class. The BBC said these are goals, not quotas, and carry no link to pay.
A review published earlier this year found that diversity initiatives had left audiences feeling representation was being "shoe-horned" into programming, and described the corporation as overly "middle-class" and "London-centric." The BBC said it had taken the findings on board.
Published October 8, 2026 · Frisian News