How much should you expect to make as a UI designer in the UK? We gathered our information through anonymous submissions from our global community of over 300,000 designers. Based on this data, UI designers who work in the United Kingdom make an average of £38,000 every year, ranging from about £20,000 to approximately £70,000.

Let’s break down our findings on average UI designer salaries by experience.

Entry-level UI Designer salary in the UK

Entry-level UI designers are those who are just starting out and have no professional experience in the design industry. They may be recent university graduates or people who have decided to shift careers. If this description of entry-level UI designers matches you and you work in the UK, you can expect to make an average of £17,500 per year.

Junior-level UI Designer salary in the UK

Junior UI designers usually have 1 to 3 years of experience in the field. They are still getting to know the industry, but they can already work in a team setting and produce very valuable work. In the UK, junior UI designers usually make about £25,000 per year.

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Mid-level UI Designer salary in the UK

Mid-level UI designers are those who have been working in the field for quite a few years (usually 3 to 8) and have gained significant experience. They are proficient in their craft and tend to produce higher-quality work than junior UX/UI designers. If this description of mid-level UI designers matches you and you work in the UK you can expect to make an average of £37,500 per year.

Senior UI Designer salary in the UK

If you are a senior UI Designer, it generally means that you have upwards of 8 years of experience in your field. By now, you have become proficient in what you do and can often produce the highest-quality work in the shortest time. If you are looking to work as a senior UI Designer in the UK, you should be aiming for jobs offering around £65,000 per year.

Are you a UI Designer from the United Kingdom? Help other designers form realistic expectations about their salaries — submit your salary now.

What Do UI Designers Do?

A user interface (UI) designer is responsible for creating visually appealing and functional interfaces. While UX designers are busy gathering information and insights about target users, UI designers use this information to craft interactive design elements like buttons, menus, inputs, tabs, sidebars, sliders, cards, lists, and dialogs. When it's a small business or startup, one person can handle both the UX and UI.

UI designers can implement tasks like:

  • Creating low and high-fidelity wireframes and prototypes
  • Maintaining consistency by creating a style guide or following it
  • Designing all interface screens users might interact with
  • Analyzing the application and effect of layout, color, typography, and other design elements
  • Ensuring the responsiveness of all layouts
  • Crafting animations

The jobs of UI and UX designers are often interlaced. However, while a UX designer is more concerned about the overall feel of the product's user experience, a UI designer takes care of how the product's interface functions, looks, and feels.

Skills to Increase UI Designer Salaries

A UI designer's salary ranges based on their skills, education, certifications, and experience. Investigate how to improve the UX design skills that you might need for applying for your dream job:

  • The ability to work and communicate with a team, as well as empathy, creativity, critical thinking and problem solving, and openness to feedback. Depending on your level of seniority and how many people you'll be working with, team management skills may also be required. Test your skills with Uxcel's Core Qualities assessment and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • Accessibility: especially for UI designers, it is vital to pay attention to the details that can make or break an interface's usability for people with disabilities. Test your skills with Uxcel's Accessibility skill test and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • Prototyping and wireframing in high and low fidelity, which will help you communicate your designs to developers and stakeholders and allow researchers to test them with users. Test your skills with Uxcel's Prototyping and Wireframing skill tests, and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • An understanding of responsive and mobile design, to create interfaces that work an all screen sizes. Test your skills with Uxcel's Responsive Design skill test, and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • An eye for detail, which guarantees that you will spot mistakes before launching a product. Test your skills with Uxcel's Attention to Detail skill test and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • Very solid knowledge of the core principles of visual design, which will allow you to perfect the look of your product. Test your skills with Uxcel's Principles of Design skill test and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • Awareness of the best practices of the most common UI components and patterns. Test your skills with Uxcel's Design Patterns skill test and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • Overall, the ability to integrate the visual aspects of branding and style guides, or design systems, into your interfaces. Test your skills with Uxcel's Visual Design assessment and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.
  • Proficiency with some UI design and handoff tools like Figma, Adobe XD, Sketch, Avocode, and Zeplin. Test your knowledge of design tools with Uxcel's Figma, Adobe XD, and Sketch skill tests, and see how you measure up to other designers worldwide.

Career Paths for UI Designers

UI designers come from various educational and professional backgrounds, but a design or web development background can certainly be a great advantage. There's no specific user interface college degree program, so you can start your journey by learning visual design and prototyping tools (Sketch, Figma, Proto.io, Framer, etc.) and studying design principles.

UI designer career path

By taking Uxcel's UI Designer career path, you will learn composition, UX design basics, accessibility, color theory, typography, and the best practices for building design components — the foundations for becoming a pro UI designer.

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