The BBC has paid white staff less than black, Asian and minority-ethnic colleagues in every pay band on the mean, and in six of seven on the median, according to its own annual report and accounts for 2025-26.
In the lowest band, black, Asian, mixed and other ethnic-minority employees had median pay 13.2 per cent higher than white staff.
In the highest band the gap was 5.3 per cent, again in favour of minority staff.
White median pay was higher in only one scale, band F, and then by 0.6 per cent.
The corporation’s grades run from A, the lowest, to F, then a separate tier of senior leaders. Most staff sit in C and D.
The median is the midpoint of the workforce. The mean is the simple average, which a small number of very large salaries can pull upwards.
On the median, minority staff are paid more in every grade except F: 13.2 per cent more at the bottom, 1.3 per cent in B, 5.4 per cent in C, 3.5 per cent in D, 4.3 per cent in E, and 5.3 per cent among senior leaders.
Band F is the exception, and a narrow one: White staff are ahead by 0.6 per cent.
On the mean the exception disappears. White staff are paid less in every grade, by 9.3 per cent at the top. The corporation says its pay is “fair, clear and competitive”.
The same report shows the pattern is not confined to race.
Women in senior leadership were paid 1.4 per cent more than senior men.
Disabled managers were paid 7.5 per cent more than other managers.
The highest-paid LGBTQ+ employees earned 8.8 per cent more than colleagues recorded as not LGBTQ+.
The headline ethnicity gap still favours white staff, by 0.7 per cent, and men by 7.6 per cent. That is an average across the whole workforce.
White employees, men, the able-bodied and straight staff hold a larger share of the best-paid jobs, which pulls the overall figure up.
The BBC said the share of ethnic-minority staff in higher-paid roles rose in 2025-26, the largest year-on-year move in the series.
John Whittingdale, the former culture secretary who ran the department between 2015 and 2016 and helped draw up the 2016 royal charter, said the corporation should pay staff “on the basis of the value and merit they contribute”.
The gaps sit alongside a 50:20:14:25 diversity target, aiming for half the workforce to be women, 20 per cent ethnic minority, 14 per cent disabled or neurodivergent, 25 per cent working-class; and mentoring schemes built to move black, Asian and minority-ethnic staff up the grades.
The figures have landed while the corporation’s funding and remit are being rewritten. The current royal charter expires on December 31, 2027, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport published the terms of reference for its review on December 16, 2025. The licence fee rose to £180 (€207) a year on April 1, 2026.
The BBC has been criticised for similar race-based policies on screen, under the industry term “colour-blind casting”.
An independent review of portrayal and representation commissioned by the BBC, published in January, defended the practice in principle but warned that diversity measured at programme level could look “clunky” where it did not arise from the story or the setting.
In King & Conqueror, the BBC’s drama about the events of 1066, Elander Moore, of Trinidadian descent, was cast as Morcar, the Anglo-Saxon Earl of Northumbria who fought the Vikings and the Normans, and Jason Forbes as a fictional Anglo-Saxon thane.
Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light put non-white actors in the Tudor court.
The 60th-anniversary Doctor Who special “Wild Blue Yonder” cast Nathaniel Curtis, who is of mixed Indian and white descent, as Isaac Newton. The review named that episode.
The historian Zareer Masani called the approach “absolutely crazy” for a period before the Norman Conquest, when Britain was at its least multicultural.
David Abulafia, the Cambridge historian, said viewers would have to put up with the “bizarre notion that there were black earls in Anglo-Saxon England”.
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