Last updated: · Dataset: 1,804 UK job adverts, 21 occupations
Open ten UK job adverts and count what they offer beyond the wage. In most of them you will find almost nothing to count. We read 1,804 fresh UK adverts across 21 occupations and logged every benefit named against a list of 23. The median advert named one. 38.5% named none at all.
That is the readable half of it. The part that should give an employer pause is what happened when we compared adverts naming more benefits against ones naming fewer, inside the same occupation. More did not buy more applicants. In most roles it went the other way.
Adverts naming a pension drew a median of 2.5 fewer applications than ones that did not, holding across 18 occupations. The perks section is not the recruiting tool employers seem to think it is.
What actually gets named
A pension is the closest thing to a norm, and even that appears in barely more than a third of adverts overall. Everything else drops off fast, and what looks common in one occupation is often close to absent everywhere else.
| Benefit | Share of adverts | Share of employers | Highest occupation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pension | 36.2% | 43.0% | Nurse, 71.7% |
| Bonus or commission | 23.3% | 32.1% | Customer service, 58.5% |
| Holiday allowance stated | 23.1% | 30.0% | Healthcare assistant, 47.1% |
| Wellbeing or employee assistance | 17.1% | 22.3% | Operations manager, 36.0% |
| Staff discount | 13.7% | 13.4% | Care worker, 53.8% |
| Flexible working | 12.3% | 17.5% | Healthcare assistant, 27.5% |
| Private healthcare | 10.5% | 14.8% | Senior account manager, 23.3% |
| Gym or leisure membership | 2.9% | 4.8% | Nurse, 18.3% |
| Dental or optical cover | 1.8% | 2.5% | Operations manager, 16.0% |
| Meals or food provided | 1.0% | 2.1% | Care worker, 5.1% |
Share of adverts naming the benefit, and share of distinct employers naming it at least once. Full 23-benefit table in the method note.
Gym membership, dental cover and meals barely register at all, well under 3% each. The things perk-culture articles obsess over are close to fictional in the average UK advert. What is there tends to be occupation-specific: nurses lead on pension, customer service leads on bonus, care workers lead on staff discount.
More benefits does not mean more applicants
The obvious theory is that a longer perks list should draw a longer queue. We tested it by comparing, inside each occupation, adverts above and below that occupation's own median benefit count. Median difference: -1.5 applications, more in 5 occupations and fewer in 13 of the 21 we could test. Loading up the perks section is not the lever employers seem to think it is.
Pension is the clearest single case, and the only one where the confidence interval does not cross zero: adverts naming one drew a median of 2.5 fewer applications, holding across 18 occupations. A handful of others point the same way on smaller samples. Private healthcare is the honest exception, running the other direction on a reasonable sample of 9 occupations, which we are reporting rather than leaving out because it does not fit the pattern.
| Benefit | Occupations tested | Median difference | 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pension | 18 | -2.5 | -5.75 to -0.5 |
| Wellbeing or employee assistance | 14 | -1.5 | -7 to 0 |
| Staff discount | 10 | -2 | -10.75 to 1 |
| Bonus or commission | 14 | -0.25 | -4 to 3 |
| Holiday allowance stated | 15 | -0.5 | -5 to 1 |
| Private healthcare | 9 | +3.5 | -3 to 6.5 |
Median difference in applications between adverts naming the benefit and adverts not naming it, computed inside each occupation then combined. Negative means fewer applications. Benefits resting on fewer than five occupations are left out of this table; they are in the source data but too thin to read anything into.
We have killed a better-looking finding than this before once we controlled for occupation properly, so the same scrutiny applies here. Roles that already pay well or already sit in large, structured employers may simply write longer adverts for reasons that have nothing to do with perks specifically. This does not prove that offering a pension repels applicants. It says that naming one, in this data, does not draw them in.
What to do with this
If you are applying, do not let a short or empty perks section talk you out of a role. The median advert says almost nothing about benefits and that tells you nothing about the job. Read the wage, the hours and what the employer actually wants, because that is what is real on the page.
If you are writing the advert, padding the perks section is not the lever this data supports. The wording candidates actually respond to is upstream of benefits entirely, covered in our look at where a longer advert's extra words go, which is mostly benefits copy rather than anything about the job itself.
Methodology and limitations
1,804 fresh, deduplicated UK adverts across 21 occupations, drawn from 2,979 unique Reed records collected in a single pull. Each advert was checked against a dictionary of 23 named benefits (pension, bonus or commission, holiday allowance, wellbeing or employee assistance, life assurance, staff discount, flexible working, private healthcare, enhanced family leave, company car, refer-a-friend, cycle to work, parking, share scheme, birthday leave, funded training, relocation or visa sponsorship, salary sacrifice, gym membership, sick pay, dental or optical cover, meals, and professional fees paid), version 1 of that dictionary.
Prevalence is measured within an occupation on one job board, not a national estimate, and a benefit that is not named in the advert may still exist in the job. Both the advert-share and employer-share columns are reported because a single employer running one benefits block across dozens of adverts can move an occupation's number on its own; the two columns diverging is the sign that has happened.
Limits. The application-count comparisons are cross-sectional, taken at one point in an advert's life rather than tracked over time, and occupation is a coarse control. Several benefits in the source data (share scheme, sick pay, relocation support, gym membership, birthday leave) rest on fewer than five occupations and are not treated as reliable findings here, only the wider-sampled ones are. No causal claim is made in either direction: this describes what UK job adverts say, not why candidates apply.
