Motor Trader has named the dealer groups with the highest average salary per employee in the just published MT Top 200 Dealer Groups.
In top slot is TC Harrison Group with an average annual salary of £53,762. The group’s company bill comes to £29.3m and it has 546 employees on its books.
In second place was luxury car dealer group HR Owen, which paid an average salary of £51,085 while Toyota dealer Jemca Car Group paid out an average salary of £50,788.
Gates Group was in fourth slot with an average salary of £47,924 and in fifth place was the factory owned Park Lane BMW with an average salary of £47,925.
MT Top 200 report author Chris Oakham said: “There were 192 dealer groups with full details of wages and salaries, excluding estimates and accounts from before June 2023.
“On a weighted basis, average pay worked out as £37,008 per annum. This is some 6.5% higher than more than the national average for all UK employees (full and part-time via ONS).
“In last year’s report the gap was 11%. The closing down of this gap is because wages and salaries across the whole UK economy, 2022 to 2023, increased at a faster rate than for the MT Top 200 groups over the same period.
“For a more accurate year-on-year comparison, there were 188 groups that appear in both the 2024 and 2025 MT Top 200 with accounts available from June 2023 – excluding estimates. On a weighted basis for these groups, average pay increased by 3.6%. Clearly, groups are lagging on pay, which could cause problems with staff retention,” he said.
The Top 10 by average pay reward their staff with levels well above the MT Top 200 as a whole. Eight groups listed in this sub-table appeared in last year’s report.
START BOX
| Rank | Top 200 Rank | Company | Total wages/salaries (£000) | Latest Employees | Average salary/employee (£) |
| 1 | 50 | TC Harrison Group | 29,354 | 546 | 53,762 |
| 2 | 36 | HR Owen plc | 25,389 | 497 | 51,085 |
| 3 | 53 | Jemca Car Group | 22,042 | 434 | 50,788 |
| 4 | 82 | Gates Group | 14,473 | 302 | 47,924 |
| 5 | 90 | Park Lane BMW | 9,714 | 209 | 46,478 |
| 6 | 46 | Citygate Automotive | 28,536 | 625 | 45,657 |
| 7 | 34 | Cambria Automobiles | 28,159 | 628 | 44,839 |
| 8 | 80 | William Morgan Group | 14,514 | 331 | 43,848 |
| 9 | 32 | Sinclair Motor Holdings | 33,257 | 764 | 43,530 |
| 10 | 23 | Swansway Group | 49,992 | 1,154 | 43,321 |
| Note: 1.) This table is based solely on those businesses for which figures were available excluding estimates. | |||||
| 2.) This tables only includes those groups reporting from June 2023. | |||||