PAY BANDS
Six jobs. Put them in order of what they actually pay.
Loading today's list
How to play
Six real jobs, in the wrong order. Move them until the highest paid is at the top and the lowest paid is at the bottom, then submit.
You score a point for each neighbouring pair you put in the right order, so five points is perfect. One job in the wrong place costs you at most two.
Use the up and down buttons on each row. On a computer you can also drag a row.
Loading today's pay bands.
How PAY BANDS works
Six real jobs, drag them into order by what they actually pay, lowest to highest. Scoring is on adjacent pairs rather than exact positions: there are five gaps between six jobs, and you score one for each pair you get the right way round. Five out of five is a perfect day.
That scoring matters more than it sounds. One job badly misplaced costs you two points, not six, so a list that is broadly right still scores well. It also means there is no benefit to guessing wildly at the top and bottom.
What the numbers are
Approximate UK median full-time gross annual salaries, rounded, drawn from a list of 96 jobs spanning £22,000 to £130,000 across 30 fields. Median, not average, and gross, not take-home.
Two jobs closer than £3,000 apart never appear in the same puzzle. Every comparison you are asked to make has a real gap in it, so nothing on the board is a coin flip between two effectively identical salaries.
They are indicative figures rather than a pay survey. Any individual salary swings enormously with region, employer and years in post, and a London figure for the same title can be half again what the median says. The game is about relative order, which survives that variation better than absolute numbers do.
What the list actually looks like
Some of this is worth knowing before you start, because the shape of the data is not quite what most people assume.
- Healthcare owns the top. Five of the ten best-paid roles on the list are medical, and the highest of the lot is an anaesthetist at £130,000. If a consultant-grade clinician turns up in your six, they are almost certainly your top slot.
- Aviation and maritime are the surprise. By field average they sit second and joint-second, ahead of both healthcare and finance. An air traffic controller on £88,000 outranks most of the management roles on the list, and people place them far too low.
- The bottom is hospitality and facilities, not the roles people expect. Kitchen porter, bar staff, cleaner and barista occupy four of the five lowest positions.
- Rank the field before the title. A senior role in a low-paying field routinely earns less than a mid-level one in a high-paying field, and the field average is the better first guess.
- Get the ends right first. Each pair is worth the same, and the extremes are much easier to be sure of. The middle four are where the puzzle actually lives, and where being wrong costs least.
How it stays honest
The salaries stay on the server until you commit an order. They are not in the payload your browser receives at the start, so the answer cannot be read out of the developer console. Same six jobs for everybody on the same UTC day.