The Payroll

The 2025 accounts of OpenAI's British arm landed at Companies House on the 13th of October 2026: 110 people, £258,036,962, an average package of £2,345,791. Most of it was paper.

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There is a payslip going round the internet this week. It is not a payslip. It is an average across 110 people at OpenAI’s London office, straight from note 8: £794,297 of salary, £1,525,808 of OpenAI equity, £2,345,791 in total. Both are real, and not the same kind of number. Only one of them is money you can spend.

OpenAI UK Ltd’s accounts for 2025 were filed on the 13th of October 2026: twenty-nine pages, where the year before ran to twelve. Note 8 is the table that travelled: wages and salaries, £87,372,625Confirmednote 8, the filing, read the 15th of October 2026; share-based compensation, £167,838,900Confirmednote 8, the filing; total staff cost, £258,036,962Confirmednote 8, the filing, across an average of 110 employees. Three divisions make the number that travelled.

Run the halves apart and the excitement settles. The cash half, wages plus pension and benefits, is about £90.2 millionCalculatedmy sum of the three cash lines in note 8: taxed here, spent here. The paper half is a group charge: awards valued with “the absence of an active market” in mind. The £1.53m per headCalculated£167,838,900 divided by 110 is a mark, not a payment. Britain hosts the work; Delaware keeps the stock.

Note 2.3 explains it. The UK company “earns revenue from the parent company through a cost-plus intercompany arrangement”. It does not sell to you; it bills its parent. The turnover that grew to £292,964,030Confirmedthe statement of comprehensive income is an internal formula; the £31,738,663Confirmedprofit before taxation, the filing of profit before tax is the margin in cost-plus. The structure is ordinary; the scale is not. The upside sits in Wilmington, Delaware, where the parent sits.

The average is a frontier, not a fluke. Google’s UK company paid about £402,000Calculated£2,825,917,000 of staff costs across 7,030 staff, its 2025 filing per head in 2025, all in; I ran the division myself. Anthropic’s UK arm averaged £560,000Reportedits 2024 accounts, read by The Register; 2025 is not on the register yet in its last accounts. A frontier lab’s London payroll is priced at Silicon Valley levels, in pounds. For scale: the UK’s own Sovereign AI fund has £500 millionConfirmedthe fund’s launch, GOV.UK, the 16th of April 2026; one year of this payroll is £258 million.

The honest counterweight. None of this is a scandal: the wages land in London, the filing carries £11,390,945Confirmedthe taxation note, the filing of corporation tax, and 110 people build skills here. The company is reported to employ around 200 now, heading past 500 at a new King’s Cross office (the Telegraph’s report). Hosting the desks of American labs has shipped wages, tax and know-how. It is not the same as owning the labs, and the difference shows the day the paper becomes cash.

I marked note 8 and the headcount table below. One sentence deserves its own reading: “The wages and salaries listed in the financial statements are directly incurred by the company and not part of a recharge from a fellow group company.” The wages are really paid here.

What happens next is knowable. OpenAI has pushed its float back to 2027, the Telegraph reports; when shares become cash, the wealth event lands where the owners are. The register so far: wages, an invoice, a promise stamped in Delaware. So carry one rule out of the filing: split the next AI pay headline in two. What was paid here, and what was promised elsewhere. Cash and paper are both money; only one of them lives here.

If you are deciding where your own upside should live, I would like to hear from you: email brandon@kreostudio.co.uk.