How much does an SDR cost in the UK in 2026?

A sales development representative in the UK costs a business around £85,000 in their first year, for a mid-level rep outside London, and more like £100,000 in it. The salary is a little over half of that. The rest is the part people forget when they compare a hire with anything else, so it is worth setting out where every pound goes.

None of these figures are ours. They come from published UK salary data, the current tax rules, and the Bridge Group’s SDR research, which is the standard reference for the role. Where a number is an estimate we say so.

The salary

Published UK ranges for 2026 put an entry-level SDR at a base of £28,000 to £32,000 with on-target earnings of £34,000 to £42,000, and a mid-level rep with a year or two behind them at £35,000 to £40,000 base and £45,000 to £55,000 on target. London adds fifteen to twenty per cent. The worked example below uses a mid-level rep on a £35,000 base with £12,000 of commission at target: £47,000 if they hit their number.

What the employer pays on top of the salary

• Employer’s National Insurance at 15 per cent on everything above £5,000: about £6,300 on £47,000.
• Pension: the automatic-enrolment minimum is 3 per cent of qualifying earnings, roughly £1,200 a year. Plenty of employers pay more.
• Recruitment: an agency fee of 15 to 25 per cent of base salary is normal for a sales hire. At 20 per cent, £7,000. Advertising and interviewing the role yourself costs time rather than fee, and takes longer.
• Equipment and onboarding: a laptop, a phone, a headset, the first fortnight of training. Call it £2,000.

The tools

An SDR without a stack is a person with a phone. The minimum is a data source (£3,000 to £6,000 a year for a single licence with usable UK coverage), a dialler, a sequencing tool for email, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Bought separately, joined by exports, that is £6,000 to £10,000 a year, and it is paid whether or not the rep is producing. Enrichment, intent data and deliverability tooling are on top, and most first hires go without them.

The management time

This is the line that never makes the spreadsheet. An SDR who has nobody listening to their calls does not improve; they settle into whatever they did in week two. Real coaching is an hour a day across live calls, weekly reviews and rewriting the messaging, and in a small business it lands on the sales leader or the founder. A fifth of a £70,000 manager’s year - our estimate of what that person costs - is £14,000, and that is a conservative share.

The total, and the part that is not in it

Salary £47,000, National Insurance £6,300, pension £1,200, recruiter £7,000, equipment £2,000, tools £8,000, management £14,000. About £85,500 for the first year, before a London weighting and before anything goes wrong.

Then there is the ramp. The Bridge Group’s 2025 research across 351 B2B companies puts the average time for a new SDR to reach full productivity at 3.0 months. So the first quarter of that £85,000 buys learning, not pipeline, and the effective cost of a productive month in year one is nearer £9,500 than £7,000. The same research puts average tenure in the role at 1.9 years and the share of reps hitting quota at 60 per cent, which means that on average the whole exercise is repeated before the second year is out, and there is a two in five chance the person you hired does not reach the number the budget assumed.

What to do with the number

Use it honestly in both directions. If you already have someone who has run outbound properly and has the time to coach, the management line shrinks and the hire gets cheaper in real terms. If you do not, the £85,000 is the floor, and the question is not whether an SDR is worth it - a working one usually is - but whether the first one you hire will become a working one before the budget runs out.

That is the comparison the next post makes: the same year, hire against plugging into a function that already exists, week by week.

Sources: Salary ranges from Skipcall’s 2026 UK SDR salary guide (RepVue, Glassdoor and Bravado data); employer National Insurance and thresholds from HMRC for 2026/27; pension minimum from the automatic-enrolment rules; ramp, tenure and quota attainment from The Bridge Group, 2025 SDR Models and Metrics report. Tool, recruiter and manager-salary figures are our estimates from current list prices, standard agency terms and published UK sales-management salaries.