Finance and Governance

Discover more about Guide Dogs and what we do. Take a look at our most recent Annual Reports and Accounts or find out more about our Executive Directors and Trustees.

Guide Dogs is a growing charity and we need to recruit and retain talented colleagues with the skills and experience to help us reach even more people with sight loss.

Rewarding our staff

Every day our incredible people are helping to change lives and we’re committed to ensuring that we are rewarding them fairly for their extraordinary contribution. We believe reward is not only about paying our employees a competitive salary, it’s also about growth, career development, supporting wellbeing, providing flexibility with how we work and providing benefits that meet our colleagues needs. 

When it comes to financial reward, we offer employees a flexible benefits allowance to purchase benefits from a suite of options, a generous matched pension contribution, and pay which we believe is competitive within our sector. 

We use the AON job framework to support how we structure our organisation. AON, a global professional services firm, provides a rigorous system of job classification which we use to describe the different kind of jobs we have, and how they fit together. Each of our jobs at Guide Dogs sits within a job group, with a clear career path. Each job also has a pay band that details the pay level appropriate to that role.

We endeavour to recognise employees’ contributions, progression and the cost of living through an annual pay review. During this annual pay review process, we conduct a benchmarking exercise of all pay bands and assess inflation pressures against our budget. 

Our Trainees on our formal training programs receive a competitive rate of pay which is reviewed based on the achievement of competencies during their training programmes. 

The board of volunteer Trustees which runs Guide Dogs decides on the level of pay for our executive directors. Those staff are accountable to the board for ensuring we deliver on our charitable objectives on behalf of people with sight loss.

Guide Dogs is committed to transparency on the issue of pay and supports the recommendations in the National Council of Voluntary Organisations’ [NCVO]. Information on pay policy and remuneration levels for senior staff is available in our annual report. 

Living Wage

As a responsible and fair employer, we’re proud to say that from 1st April 2015 all Guide Dog employees have been paid at or above the Living Wage. 

Gender pay gap 2024

As part of the government’s aim to close the gender pay gap within a generation, all companies with 250 or more employees in England, Scotland and Wales are required to publish annual information regarding their gender pay gap on their company website and on a dedicated government website.

At Guide Dogs’ we recognise and respect the choices our employees make about their identities. We do not seek to erase anyone’s identity or experience; however, it is a requirement of this report to provide data on gender pay in relation to men and women.

Historical gender pay gap information