UK warehouse pay: 4 in 10 job ads offer within 50p of the minimum wage

On 4 November 2026, 35 of 86 live UK warehouse and forklift job ads on teppek started within 50p of the £12.71 legal minimum, and in the North of England it was 13 of 15.

Warehouses are hiring for the busiest weeks of their year. If you run one, you need to know what rate will actually fill a shift. If you are looking for work, you want to know whether £12.71 an hour is the going rate or a lowball offer. Pay surveys tell you what people earned last year. Job ads tell you what employers are offering right now.

So I asked an AI agent to pull every live UK warehouse and logistics job ad on teppek and read the pay line in each one. Here is what live postings say this week.

How I did it

The setup is one line. In Claude Code:

claude mcp add --transport http teppek https://mcp.teppek.com/mcp

Any agent that speaks MCP can do the same. Searching does not need an account.

Then I asked, in plain language:

• "Show me every UK job posting in the logistics and warehouse category."
• "Which ones write an hourly rate in the ad? When the ad gives a range, take the lowest number."
• "Split them by role: warehouse operatives, forklift and truck operators, drivers. Then by region and by shift."
• "Who posted them? Is one advertiser behind most of a group?"

Behind those questions the agent called two tools. search_listings with a country and a category returns the matching postings 50 at a time; there were 393 in the category that day. get_listing opens a single posting so you can read the full ad.

The rules I applied:

1. Only pay the employer wrote. I used the hourly rate written in the ad text and dropped the 41 ads that only carried an estimated salary.
2. The starting rate. "£13.20 to £15.39 per hour" counts as £13.20. Higher numbers in a range are usually night, weekend or overtime rates.
3. Count advertisers. One staffing agency posted 20 of the 86 warehouse ads, so I checked every result without it too.
4. Small groups are examples, not findings. Any group under 15 ads is named with its number and nothing more.
5. Open the outliers. The highest rate and the ads quoting exactly the legal minimum were opened and read in full.

That left 86 warehouse and forklift ads and 49 driver ads with an hourly rate in the employer's own words.

Finding 1: 4 in 10 warehouse ads start within 50p of the legal minimum

On 4 November 2026, 35 of 86 live UK warehouse and forklift job ads on teppek offered a starting rate within 50p of the £12.71 National Living Wage, and 15 offered exactly £12.71.

The National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over has been £12.71 an hour since April 2026. No ad in the sample went below it, and many sat right on it: 58 of the 86 were within £1.

The middle of the market is £13.45 an hour, which is about £28,000 a year on a 40-hour week. The top quarter starts at £13.98, so £14 an hour is already a top-quarter offer.

The 15 ads at exactly £12.71 came from 14 different advertisers, in towns from Carlisle and Jarrow to Slough and Tunbridge Wells. Paying the legal floor is common practice across the country, not one firm's policy.

Most of this hiring goes through agencies. The 86 ads came from 39 advertisers, and the five busiest are all staffing agencies. The largest posted 20 of the 86; without it, 29 of the remaining 66 ads (44%) are still within 50p of the minimum. In their opening lines, 28 of the 86 ads describe the work as temporary, temp or ongoing work, and 15 say permanent.

The highest starting rate was a freezer warehouse job in Kent, working at temperatures down to minus 21 degrees, at £16.26 to £28.73 an hour depending on shift.

Finding 2: a forklift licence is worth about 80p an hour, a driving job about £3.80

On 4 November 2026, live UK forklift and truck operator ads on teppek offered a median £14.00 an hour against £13.20 for warehouse operatives, and van and HGV driver ads offered £17.00.

• Warehouse operatives (pickers, packers, loaders, sorters): median £13.20 an hour, 65 ads. Half of them (33 of 65) start within 50p of the minimum.
• Forklift and truck operators (reach, counterbalance, bendi, low-level order pickers): median £14.00, 21 ads. Only 2 of the 21 start within 50p of the minimum.
• Van and HGV drivers: median £17.00, 49 ads. One staffing agency posted 19 of these; without it the median is £16.34 across 30 ads.

The 80p gap is worth about £1,660 a year on a 40-hour week. A forklift licence is a short course, and it moves an applicant out of the group most likely to be offered the floor. For employers, the gap is the price of a skill they cannot fill from the general pool.

Shifts are harder to price from ads. Only 10 ads were for fixed night shifts, too few to measure a night premium. The 28 day-shift ads had a median of £13.35. Where one ad lists both, the gap is visible: a picking job in Northampton pays £13.20 an hour on days and £15.39 on nights.

Finding 3: in the North, almost every warehouse ad sits at the floor

On 4 November 2026, 13 of 15 live warehouse and forklift ads in the North of England and Yorkshire started within 50p of £12.71, against 16 of 48 in the Midlands.

In the North West, Yorkshire and the North East the median starting rate was £12.76, and 7 of the 15 ads offered exactly £12.71. They came from 13 different advertisers, in places such as Warrington, Manchester, Bolton, Wigan, Doncaster, Batley, Brighouse, Jarrow, Carlisle and Scunthorpe.

The Midlands is where most of the hiring is: 48 of the 86 ads, around Northampton, Coventry, Rugby, Lutterworth, Kettering, Nottingham and Wolverhampton. The median there was £13.62, and two in three ads started more than 50p above the floor. One likely reason, which the ads alone cannot prove: where many distribution sites recruit from the same towns, the minimum is not enough to fill shifts.

London and the South East had 14 ads, with a median of £13.47. That is no higher than the Midlands, but 14 ads are too few to call it a finding.

What it means

For employers hiring warehouse staff:

• £13.45 an hour is the middle of the market this week, and £14 puts you in the top quarter. At £12.71 you are offering the same rate as 15 of the 86 ads.
• In the Midlands the bar is higher (median £13.62). The North is where a floor-rate offer still looks like everyone else's.
• If you pay more for nights, put both rates in the first lines of the ad. Few ads do, and the ones that do show the gap clearly.

For people looking for warehouse work:

• £12.71 is the legal floor, not the going rate. In the Midlands most ads start above £13.
• A forklift licence moves the typical offer from £13.20 to £14.00 an hour; a driving licence for vans or HGVs moves it to about £17.
• When an ad shows a range, the first number is usually the day rate. Ask what the night and weekend rates are.

Try it yourself

Connect the endpoint above and ask your own version: "What do warehouse jobs around Northampton pay this week?" or "Which forklift jobs near Gloucester state an hourly rate?" You can also browse areas on the map, for example jobs around Northampton or Gloucester. Search works without an account. With the user's permission (OAuth), an agent can also message the people behind a listing or post one; the setup is described at https://www.teppek.com/auth.md.

If you would rather not set anything up, tell me a role and a UK town in the comments and I will pull this week's rates for it.

Methodology

• Date: live postings on teppek, pulled 4 November 2026; the ads were posted between 5 October and 3 November 2026.
• Country and category: United Kingdom, logistics and warehouse jobs, all 393 postings in the category that day.
• Pay: employer-stated pay only (41 ads with estimated pay dropped); hourly rate taken from the ad text; lowest number of a range used; 4 repeated ads (same advertiser, title, rate and town) counted once.
• Sample: 86 warehouse and forklift ads and 49 van and HGV driver ads with an hourly rate in the ad; office, supervisor and management roles left out.
• Roles and regions: role from the job title; region from the ad's location; North and Yorkshire = North West, Yorkshire and the Humber, North East; Midlands = East and West Midlands.
• Shifts: an ad counts as night or day only when it offers that single shift; ads offering several shifts are left out of the shift comparison.
• Advertisers: 39 advertisers behind the 86 warehouse ads; the largest posted 20, and every headline result holds without it.
• Reference rate: UK National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over, £12.71 an hour from 1 April 2026.
• Limits: one day of data, not a trend; the search reads the opening part of each ad, so a rate written further down is missed; region and shift groups are small (15 and 28 ads); only 10 night-only ads, so no night premium is claimed; agency rates may or may not include holiday pay.

How to cite

Source: teppek live listings, pulled 4 November 2026 (https://www.teppek.com)

Frequently asked questions

What do UK warehouse jobs pay per hour?
In live ads on teppek on 4 November 2026, the middle starting rate for warehouse and forklift jobs was £13.45 an hour, and 35 of 86 ads started within 50p of the £12.71 National Living Wage.

How much more does a forklift licence pay?
About 80p an hour in this week's ads: forklift and truck operator ads had a median of £14.00 an hour against £13.20 for warehouse operatives, roughly £1,660 a year on a 40-hour week.

Where in the UK do warehouse jobs pay closest to the minimum wage?
In the North of England and Yorkshire: 13 of 15 warehouse and forklift ads on 4 November 2026 started within 50p of £12.71. In the Midlands it was 16 of 48, with a median of £13.62.

Originally published at teppek Insights, with charts and the full data note.