Earning a six figure salary is the fantasy, isn’t it? Once you hit that number, you don’t suddenly become Jeff Bezos with a fleet of private jets, but you must surely feel rich. Less worrying, more spending, better holidays, more meals out, more expensive clothes, a bigger house, a better car. Life, surely, feels luxurious.
Yet, in the UK in 2026, crossing that £100,000 threshold is often positioned as both a blessing and a curse. Romy*, 37, works in the media sector, and is on a salary of £150,000 a year. The median (middle-point of all UK salaries) for full-time employee in the UK is £39,039 per year. Romy is, therefore, very much in the top percentage of earners. After tax, she has about £7,000 a month to take home.
“I earn loads of money,” she says, “and it’s really reassuring. I can see my pension going up, and if there’s an emergency, I’ll have money to deal with it.” She has, for example, just paid £600 for a private ultrasound to investigate an unexplained gynecological issue that she was told by the NHS she’d have to wait three months for. “I wouldn’t have done that before I was earning at this level,” she says. “My partner and I go on nice holidays, we can stay in nice places, and I definitely have treats.”
Romy’s salary might be objectively high but, in 2026, where the UK cost of childcare and home ownership can be prohibitive, £150,000 doesn’t make future parenthood, or home ownership, feel particularly affordable to her. This is partly due to the cost of living squeezing everyone’s wages, but it’s largely because of the UK’s “100,000 trap”, about which there is ongoing debate in parliament.
“If I was fine staying in my one-bed flat, and I didn’t want to move to a house, or have children, I think I’d feel rich,” says Romy. “I don’t want this to sound like a tiny violin, but we’re in a tricky position because if we have a child, we won’t get the free childcare hours”. To her, that makes it prohibitive.
Under the current system, when one parent’s net income exceeds £100,000, by even £1, they lose tax-free childcare worth up to £2,000 a year per child, as well as up to 30 hours of government-funded childcare a week (if the combined household income of two parents is more than £100,000 they still qualify, as long as both are individually on less than £100,000). Because of this rule, a parent earning even anything over £100,000 might pay as much as £10,000 more a year in nursery fees than someone on £99,000.
In addition, once you earn £100,000, you’re paying 60 per cent income tax in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. At the Tory party conference in October 2026, leader of the Conservative party Kemi Badenoch vowed to end this £100,000 cliff edge. “What we want to see is that people who work harder don’t get punished for doing so,” she said. “If you earn £1 over £100,000 you could lose £20,000. That’s absurd.” Badenoch confirmed that under her proposed system an employee on £1 million could still qualify for free childcare.
Badenoch said that parents should not be discouraged from working more. According to research from the University of Warwick, and the London School of Economics (LSE), the number of high-earning parents keeping their income below £100,000 to retain free childcare is set to rise by almost 1,000 per cent by the end of the decade.
Romy says: “Most people who I know can only afford one child, and the people in my life with three children are the richest people I know, or they’re not working at all, and relying on the state. Without being eligible for any childcare funding, it’d be around £2,300 a month for a nursery near us, and we can’t manage that.”
There is, of course, a reason that 57 per cent of UK parents with children under the age of 13 rely on childcare support from at least one grandparent, and that increasing numbers of parents are leaning heavily on grandparents for childcare, as nursery fees, and school wraparound costs rise year-on-year. If Romy had children in the future, she says she wouldn’t get that kind of grandparental help, so the onus would be on nursery.
Why – for argument’s sake – can’t Romy choose, as many others do, to take a pay cut, earn under the £100,000 threshold, and then qualify for funded childcare, and pay less tax? “I’m the main earner, so I couldn’t afford to work less than I do,” she says, “If I took a pay cut to be just under the £100,000 threshold, then I’d struggle to afford to pay a mortgage on a bigger flat, or house [in the area we live].
“My salary would get us a very big mortgage,” she says, “but because I don’t have any parental wealth or help, I don’t have an enormous deposit to put down on a house.” More than half of first-time buyers received financial help from their family to make house purchases last year, according to 2025 estimates by estate agency Savills. An average of £55,572 was given in loans and gifts by the so-called bank of mum and dad to buyers, it said.
Romy doesn’t have access to the bank of mum and dad, so without that help, to live in a bigger place in a decently-connected borough of London – she needs to remain in the capital for her work – she and her partner would be paying £2,000 each for a mortgage. “To buy a home, you need to earn more,” she says, “because you need the borrowing power. But once you earn more, you lose things like free childcare. I’m also really aware that if we do buy a house and we use my salary to get a mortgage, if something happens to me and I can’t work, there’s no safety net.”
HSBC surveyed 2,000 people in 2024, including 1,000 people making more than £100,000 a year. On average, respondents said an annual income of £213,000 was needed to constitute wealth. Londoners were more likely to say that the wealthy needed to earn more, putting the annual figure at £289,000, whereas those in the North said just £80,000 per annum would be enough.
“When I first started earning six figures,” says Romy, “I did probably buy myself too many treats, but I think that’s also part of this mentality where even if I could save an extra £10,000 a year by not taking us on a nice holiday, it’s still not enough to substantially increase our house deposit. I have an amazing life, but I don’t feel like I can chill out and enjoy it fully. I earn lots, but I still feel like I have to work as much as I physically can, and earn as much as I physically can.”
Ian*, 43, in North-West London had been earning £90,000 as a musical director at a performing arts school for three years. Ian’s wife is a freelance musician, and tends to make around £20,000 a year. When Ian and his wife were about to have their baby in 2024, he negotiated a role change, which came with a 14 per cent pay rise. That meant he was on just over £102,000. “I was absolutely thrilled about that,” he says, “that’s a big increase – but then, as time went on, and we did the maths, I realised that I’d essentially screwed myself over with this pay rise.
“I was now in a higher tax bracket, with no childcare funding, but also not earning so much more money that the £2,000 nursery fees were a drop in the ocean.” Ian and his wife are paying almost £850 more for nursery per month than they’d be paying if Ian had stayed on his lower salary of £90,000. And their mortgage payments were £2,800 a month (he had a £15,000 gift from his father as a house deposit).
“Loads and loads of people have it far worse,” says Ian, “and we are not remotely ‘poor’, it would be offensive to even suggest that. I wouldn’t even complain about this to friends, or in public, as I’m aware how it might sound. But it does feel harsh that I’ve ploughed myself into work and getting promotions, hoping for more financial security, but end up feeling like I’m being punished for it.
“As a parent, it isn’t worth earning just over £100,000, unless you’re somehow mortgage-free, or your partner earns loads, too, so you’ve got more cash all round. Once we got into this new tax bracket, I really noticed a shift in what we could afford.”
Ian, whose second child is six months old and will be going to nursery three or four days a week when they turn one, says he and his family won’t be going on a summer holiday, and they’re holding off doing any work on their fixer-upper three-bed terraced house. “Once we’ve paid our double nursery fees, the mortgage, bills, petrol, and the rest, we feel fine, but not remotely rich.”
Ian is keen to point out that he sees why lower earners might have zero sympathy for someone on six figures who is feeling the pinch. “A few years ago, I’d have thought I was a massive arse for even saying this” he says, “but I find it ludicrous that my family could afford more, when I was on £90,000. To earn a penny over £100,000 is, as it turns out, madness when you’ve got children in childcare. So, I worry for the UK – where’s the incentive to have children, get promotions, and prove they’re worth a higher salary?”
Romy says she’s always been proud to pay tax, that she fully believes in the welfare state and the NHS. “Yet, I am starting to feel, sorry, no, I can’t be paying more tax, and still not be able to afford a house [for myself], not get free childcare, be told I need to wait three months to talk to a specialist when I’ve got unexplained bleeding. I can’t defend any of this anymore.
“Unless you’ve got generational wealth, you are precarious in this day and age. I earn so much money, and yet I don’t feel relaxed. I feel worried about my future, and how to have a stable, secure life while also having a family and a home in the city I grew up in.”
*Name have been changed
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