UK pay report

Welcome to our UK Pay Report for 2025.

At Gowling WLG we firmly believe that diversity and inclusion makes us a stronger business – more relevant and valuable to our clients, more empowering for our people, and more engaged with our wider communities.

We celebrate different cultures, backgrounds, perspectives and experiences and support the UK government's focus on pay gap transparency to highlight areas of potential unfairness. Since 2018 our reporting has gone beyond the statutory requirement to report the gender pay gap for our UK employees, additionally setting out our ethnicity pay gap, our sexual orientation pay gap and including our Partner population within our reported data.

The pay gaps highlighted in this report stem from the structure of our workforce, which spans a diverse range of roles and is largely rooted in two distinct pay markets in the UK (London and Birmingham). In recent years, trends in the legal market have amplified the structural imbalance in our reported statutory gender pay gap through higher market-driven salary increases for our Lawyer positions compared to non-Lawyer roles. We are now seeing a positive impact on the overall pay gap (looking at our overall Employee and Partner population) as a result of our concerted programme of activity to encourage and sponsor female representation in the partnership.

We remain fully committed to a workplace in which everyone is supported to develop and progress to the best of their abilities, not only in the UK but across all our offices globally. This year marks our 26th consecutive accreditation as a Great Place to Work and, as we plan for 2026, we are actively exploring new ways to capture honest and tangible feedback to build further on this existing strong foundation.

Importantly, we are confident that our robust annual assurance processes ensure we offer equal pay for equal roles and performance. We are also proud to be an accredited “living wage employer” in the UK, going beyond our statutory obligations and paying at least the “real living wage” to all our employees, including apprentices.

We are pleased to share in this report a snapshot of our recent activities and investments to bring this to life – and promote fairness, inclusion and equality across all parts of our organisation.

I confirm that the data reported is accurate.

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