Wages mapped: UK's best and worst places for pay revealed - is your area on list?

The median full time wage rose last year - but which area was found to pay the best?

Last year the median annual full-time wage rose by 5.8% to £34,963, while the median weekly salary increased by 6.2% to £681.

But wages are much higher in some parts of the country than others. Median annual pay is higher in Scotland (£35,518) than it is in England (£35,106), Northern Ireland (£32,879) or Wales (£32,371).

Among English regions, there is a distinct North-South divide with workers in London earning the highest annual pay packet (£44,370), followed by the South East (£34,963), and East of England (£34,833). The lowest wages are in the North East (£31,200), followed by the East Midlands (£31,634), and then Yorkshire and the Humber (£31,920).

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data comes from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, based on a 1% sample of full-time jobs taken from HMRC's Pay As You Earn (PAYE) records. It illustrates huge differences between the wages of people living in the UK’s best and least-paid council areas.

You can check the median wage where you live and see how it compares to the rest of the country using our interactive map below

Discounting the City of London banking district - which is only home to a small number of people who mainly work in highly paid jobs within the finance industry - workers living in the London borough of Tower Hamlets earn the most money. The median annual pay in Tower Hamlets is £61,984 and the median weekly pay £1,120. However, many people living and working in London receive a higher wage due to the increased costs of living in the capital.

Outside London, workers living in affluent Three Rivers in Hertfordshire earned the highest annual median wage of £46,232, followed by residents of the remote Shetland Islands to the north of Scotland (£44,052), and then Ribble Valley in Lancashire (£41,874) - which is by far the highest paid council area in the North of England.

At the end of the spectrum workers in Oadby and Wigston, Leicestershire take home a median wage of just £24,337 annually or £470 per week, the lowest in the UK. Next is Burnley in Lancashire (£28,173 annually) and then Merthyr Tydfil in Wales (£27,852) and Torbay in Devon (£27,116).

The ONS data shows the median and mean salaries of full-time workers who live in each part of the country. The ONS believes median pay - the amount which 50% of jobs fall below - is a more accurate measure of average earnings than taking the mean amount, which can be skewed by a small number of very high-paid jobs.