Salary inflation across Building Services has outpaced most site budgets. Here is how to check whether your engineer package is still credible before you advertise and find out the hard way.
Job titles have stopped being useful
Two roles called Mobile Maintenance Engineer can sit £9k apart. The difference is rarely the work, it is the ticket set, the patch size, the call-out rota and whether the van and fuel card are genuinely included. When you benchmark on the title alone, you end up comparing your role against someone else's easier one.
Build the benchmark from the parts an engineer actually prices: qualifications required, hours committed, travel expected, and what happens at 6pm on a Friday.
Advertised is not accepted
Job boards show what employers hope to pay. Accepted offers show what the market cleared at. Across the roles we placed in the last two quarters, the accepted figure sat consistently above the mid-point of the advertised band, because the people worth hiring were already in work and needed a reason to move.
If your band's mid-point is your ceiling in practice, your advert is quietly aimed at candidates who are out of work rather than the ones you want.
Price the vacancy, not just the salary
An empty engineer seat is not free. Overtime cover, subcontractor call-outs, SLA exposure and the slow erosion of a supervisor's goodwill all land somewhere. Set that monthly figure against the annual uplift needed to be competitive and the decision usually makes itself.
What to do this week
Pick your two hardest-to-fill roles. Write down the ticket set, shift and patch. Ask for real accepted-offer data on that exact shape of role in your region, then compare it to the band you are working to. If the gap is more than five per cent, fix the band before you advertise again.
