Public Sector Total Reward Higher Than Private Sector

A recently published article by four researchers from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has stated that the average total reward (i.e. total gross pay plus employer pension contributions) is higher in the public than in the private sector.

The root cause of this situation is the fact that 57% of private sector workers receive no pension contributions from their employers, while only 10% of public sector employees do not have a pension funded by their employer.

As a corollary to this, the same research also found that, in cases where private sector workers did receive pension contributions from their employers, their total reward was the highest.

The research in the article was based on an analysis of the latest available figures from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) from the ONS. These statistics relate to the employee's pay period (for example, a week or a month) that included the 22nd of April 2009. The data used is based around a