Nottinghamshire County Council’s chief executive earns just over £208,000 a year, around eight times the salary of the authority’s lowest-paid staff, according to the council’s latest pay policy statement.
The figures are contained in the council’s Pay Policy Statement for 2025-26, which sets out how the authority pays senior officers and other employees and how pay levels compare across the organisation. The document is produced in line with the Localism Act 2011, which requires local authorities to publish an annual statement detailing senior pay arrangements to allow public scrutiny.
According to the statement, the council’s highest-paid employee is Chief Executive Adrian Smith, whose fixed salary is £208,117 following the national pay award applied from April 2025.
At the other end of the pay scale, the council defines its lowest-paid employees as those on Grade 1 spinal column point 2. Including a Living Wage allowance, the minimum hourly rate paid to staff is £13.45, equivalent to a full-time salary of £25,949 a year. The council says around 500 employees benefit from this rate, many of whom live in some of the most deprived areas of Nottinghamshire.
The figures mean the chief executive’s salary is eight times that of the lowest-paid workers, expressed as a pay multiple of 8:1. The council says this ratio has reduced over the past three years, having been 9.03:1 in 2023.
The statement also shows that the council’s median full-time equivalent salary — the midpoint of all pay levels across the workforce — was £33,699 as of February 2026. Based on this figure, the chief executive’s pay is around 6.2 times the median salary of council staff, again lower than the equivalent ratio of 7.48:1 recorded in 2023.
Nottinghamshire County Council is one of the largest local authorities in England, serving a population of about 824,822 people. The authority employs around 6,120 staff directly, excluding school-based employees, and manages a budget of around £1.2 billion while delivering more than 400 statutory and discretionary services across the county.
The policy statement explains that the council’s senior leadership structure includes the chief executive, three executive directors and three service directors who report directly to the chief executive. Their pay levels are set according to the responsibilities of each role, including statutory duties, the size of services overseen and comparisons with similar posts in other public sector organisations.
The council says it does not pay bonuses to employees and instead follows national pay bargaining arrangements for local government staff through the National Joint Council framework. For 2025-26, the national pay award for chief officers and other employees was an increase of 3.2 per cent.
The authority also states that it has adopted the Living Wage Foundation rate for staff since 2014, paying the current £13.45 hourly rate as an allowance on top of its pay scale for the lowest grades.
Under the council’s governance arrangements, senior officer appointments are made by elected members through the Senior Staffing Committee, with certain posts — including the chief executive, monitoring officer and section 151 officer — requiring ratification by full council.
The statement also notes that any severance packages for senior officers worth £100,000 or more must be approved by full council. No such payments were made between February 2025 and January 2026.
