One in thirty households in the United Kingdom received welfare payment benefits last year that were higher than the average worker’s salary, study finds. Research published by the UK’s Conservative Party — which not long ago bowed out after 14 years in power — found that 625,618 households across the UK were handed more than £32,200 in welfare in 2025, the average annual salary of a British worker. Of the total, 16,000 households received more than £60,000 in welfare payments, which in Britain’s highly compressed income scales is a fair middle-class wage.
While the amount of households that received more than the average British worker’s payment in benefits last year is fractionally lower than the 667,278 documented during the 2023-2024 period, it still represents double than the 392,000 that received such levels of benefits between 2019 and 2020. Between 2024-25, 267,000 households received more than £40,000 in yearly benefits, while 91,000 were paid more than £50,000. Per the study’s findings, the amount of of working-age households receiving more than £30,000 in yearly benefits from the British state has surged by more than a third to 800,000 last year since the Department for Work and Pensions started using administrative income data instead of relying solely on surveys, The Daily Telegraph reported.
