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\t\tMeet Henry – a high earner not rich yet (Image created by Chat GPT)\t<\/p>\n\t\t\tThursday 26 March 2026 5:15 am
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\t\t\tTuesday 24 March 2026 1:41 pm\n\t<\/p>\n
\t\tMeet Henry – a high earner not rich yet (Image created by Chat GPT)\t<\/p>\n
High Earners, Not Rich Yet are being hammered by tax, housing and childcare costs. Here\u2019s how to fix the system so HENRYs don\u2019t just participate in the workforce, but also prosper, says Louis Coke<\/p>\n
The acronym \u2018HENRY\u2019 has been around for a while, and the problem that it encompasses is only getting bigger and bigger for many young people in the UK. HENRY stands for High Earner, Not Rich Yet. This encompasses quite a number of people in the UK, typically aged in their 30s and 40s and earning north of \u00a3100k per year. In a nutshell, the challenge this cohort have is that their income gives them the means to participate in daily life, but not to prosper within it, and to build wealth.<\/p>\n
Many of these people are highly educated (with student debt to boot), are working far more than the EU recommended 38 hours per week (otherwise known as \u2018Wednesday\u2019 in the City) and are doing what they understand to be the \u2018right things\u2019, but they have little to show for it versus their expectations.<\/p>\n
Four core pressures<\/p>\n
The core pressures here are fourfold. Firstly, tax. The UK is a high tax country, and income is taxed at the highest rates. Years of allowances remaining frozen and some trickery around personal allowances and tapering means that the difference between gross and net pay is now something you could drive a proverbial London bus through. High tax on its own may not be a significant issue, depending on how much everything else costs. However, that links to our second issue; housing.<\/p>\n
The UK (not unlike other countries, to be fair) has not built enough housing to keep up with demand for many years. Instead, we have largely used creative financing measures and longer-term debt structures to \u2018solve\u2019 the issue of high housing costs. In my view this really doesn\u2019t fix the underlying problem, and it causes another challenge later down the line in terms of retirement provision, which will look very different for this cohort compared to those who came before it. Data shows that the average home in England (let alone London\/South East) costs nearly eight times median earnings (2024, ONS).<\/a><\/p>\n House price growth has surpassed wages, and house prices do not care if you end up paying a higher tax rate as you try to increase your earnings to catch up. What does that do to motivation? In the past I have heard criticisms of that HENRYs spend their cash on experiences and frivolities, but the reality in many cases is that discretionary spend really isn\u2019t going to compensate for the big, structural disadvantages they face. The numbers are far too big.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t Our third conundrum is childcare costs. There is a separate conversation to be had in society about the risks of falling birth rates but at a very high level, we do need people to keep reproducing for our economy, society and government spending model to continue. However, childcare is often cripplingly expensive which either puts people off having children entirely or relieves them of any capital they have accrued up until that point in their careers. The UK has one of the highest childcare to income ratios in the OECD at 19 per cent<\/a>, although from personal experience of having two young children, I can vouch for periods of time where this ratio can exceed 40%. Good times.<\/p>\n The final challenge for HENRYs is one that many of them haven\u2019t even got onto thinking about yet: retirement provision. Gone are the days of loyalty to an employer being rewarded with a nice final salary pension scheme. This cohort is being left largely on their own. Opinions vary on the future of the state pension, but my personal view is that this is very likely to be means tested away by the time the HENRYs get to the point of retiring. The triple lock is a fantastic offering from the government, but it has become unaffordable and, at the same time, politically extremely sensitive to water down. Therefore, a bit of moving the goalposts around criteria for receiving it is where I suspect the \u2018axe\u2019 will fall in future years.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tRead more<\/p>\n
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