How to earn £100,000 a year – from your own sofa

Nearly four years on from the first pandemic decree to “work from home”, the practice is now well and truly embedded.

British workers spend an average of one-and-a half days a week home working, the most of any European country. Yet even as Covid fades into the past, opportunities to avoid the office grow. The proportion of “flexible working” roles advertised on jobs site Adzuna shot up by over a half in 2023, from 15.1pc to 23.5pc.

Some of these roles are highly lucrative. James Neave, head of data science at Adzuna, says it is now far easier to earn a high salary from the comfort of your living room. “It’s much more common, certainly compared to preCovid, simply because a larger proportion of jobs are now flexible.

“High-paid roles tend to be hard to hire for, so it’s a necessity almost for a lot of companies to give this flexibility. Hiring remotely opens up the pool of candidates enormously.”

GOLD-PLATED REMOTE ROLES Data from Adzuna show that many of the highest- paid remote roles are reserved for professionals at the top of their field.

For “fully remote” roles, specialist medical practitioners come out on top with a median salary of £115,219, ahead of dental practitioners along with – perhaps surprisingly – betting shop managers, on £100,000.

Dentistry from home? It sounds unlikely. But this “interesting trend”,

Mr Neave says, reflects the rise of virtual health providers offering online consultations. For “flexible” working roles, specialist medical practitioner was the only occupation for which median salaries topped £100,000, at £ 103,833, followed by rail transport operatives (£84,000) and chief executives and senior officials (£80,091).

But the word “flexible” can be deceiving, Mr Neave says. “When companies offer ‘flexible’ working there are two spins to it. One is that it’s flexible whether you work in the office or work from home, or it means working hours.

“There’s been a big change in the last year with warehouse and logistics roles, ones that you can’t see how they could be done remotely – you’ve got to be in the warehouse. But a good chunk get advertised as flexible now, where flexibility is around days of the week worked.”

However, the data show that for the very highest-paid remote jobs, opportunities are becoming scarcer. The share of fully remote jobs that pay a salary of over £100,000 fell from 19.3pc to 11.1pc in 2023, a drop Mr Neave characterises as “a bit of a return to normality”.

FREELANCING PAYS

Remote work has also been a godsend for footloose freelancers. Hired guns, particularly in the IT space, can “absolutely” pull in big salaries, and secure lucrative working from home contracts, Mr Neave says.

Research by the hybrid hospitality brand The Social Hub found that the tech industry offers the best opportunities for freelance digital nomads in the UK. Computer hardware engineer ranked top with 21.2pc of roles advertised as remote, followed by web developer ( 18.9pc), IT data analyst ( 18.7pc) and systems administrator (17.6pc).

Other well- paid professions lend themselves to remote working, including recruitment. Recruiters are responsible for screening, interviewing and hiring, and may also scout universities. This requirement to travel lends itself to flexible arrangements. Salaries for experienced recruiters can reach £98,618, according to Glassdoor.

Quantity surveyors, who manage all of the construction costs relating to building projects, can carry out much of their work remotely, albeit with regular visits to their construction sites. Experienced freelancers can earn up to £80,000 a year.

BEWARE THE TAX MAN

Many of the companies who have embraced the working from home trend most passionately allow their employees to do the job from anywhere.

Clothes marketplace Depop, charity Blood Cancer UK, apprenticeship platform Multiverse and nutritional shake maker Huel all offer fully remote policies. The bank Zopa specifies that its employees can work from abroad for up to 120 days a year, while credit provider Klarna gives staff up to 20 days a year working in a foreign country. However, digital nomads face tax traps if they go about globe-hopping in the wrong way.

David Lesperance, an international tax and migration adviser, warns that high- earning remote workers can fall foul of residency rules. “It really comes down to how much time you’re spending in the new tax jurisdiction,” he says. Remote workers can accidentally trigger an obligation to pay tax if they work outside Britain for more than 183 days in a 12-month period.

Mr Lesperance adds: “In Portugal, for instance, if you spend more than six months of the year there, you are classed as a Portuguese tax resident, and it will impose a certain amount of tax on them whether the income is made in Porto or Portsmouth.”

It may be that your income while working abroad ends up being taxed twice. If so, you can usually claim a share of it back via Foreign Tax Credit Relief.