BT Chief Executive’s Pay Doubles to £5.6m as Company Cuts Thousands of Jobs and Revenues Fall Below £20bn
BT Chief Executive’s Pay Doubles to £5.6m as Company Cuts Thousands of Jobs and Revenues Fall Below £20bn
BT chief executive Allison Kirkby received a £5.6m pay package for the year to 31 March 2026 — more than double the £2.5m she earned the previous year — as the telecoms giant accelerated a sweeping restructuring programme that has eliminated thousands of jobs and pushed annual revenues below £20bn for the first time in a decade.
The Pay Package
According to BT’s annual report, Kirkby’s total remuneration of £5.58m comprised £1.1m in salary, pension and benefits, a £1.08m annual bonus, and £3.25m from long-term share awards. The company confirmed she earned 49 per cent of the maximum available annual bonus after meeting a range of customer satisfaction and transformation targets.
BT also disclosed that Kirkby will receive a three per cent salary increase from June — her first pay rise since becoming chief executive in February 2024. The disclosure is expected to attract scrutiny from investors and trade unions given the scale of the company’s ongoing job cuts.
A Restructuring Programme of Exceptional Scale
BT has raised its cost-saving target from £3bn to £3.7bn and extended its restructuring programme through to 2030. The company says it has already delivered £1.5bn in annual savings. Its workforce has fallen by seven per cent over the past year to approximately 108,000 employees.
Management expects the headcount to fall further, to between 75,000 and 80,000 workers by 2030 — a reduction of more than 28,000 from current levels. The company’s fixed-network arm, Openreach, has cut more than 10,000 positions over the past two and a half years as demand for manual infrastructure work — duct digging, pole climbing — diminishes following the near-completion of its full-fibre rollout.
Kirkby stated in her annual report that BT had continued to transform “ahead of plan”, citing record fibre deployment and improving customer satisfaction scores. The company said it had exceeded its original transformation objectives, prompting management to raise the savings target by a further £700m.
Revenue Decline and Subscriber Losses
BT’s full-year revenues fell below £20bn for the first time since 2015, coming in at approximately £19.7bn. Annual revenues have dropped by £4.4bn since 2016, a trajectory that underscores the structural pressures facing the legacy telecoms sector.
The company lost 825,000 broadband subscribers in the past year and expects a further 800,000 departures in the current financial year. Over four years, BT has shed approximately 2.4 million subscribers — roughly 11 per cent of its earlier total.
Capital Expenditure and Cash Flow Targets
Kirkby has committed to reducing capital expenditure from £5.1bn to £4.3bn for the current financial year, while projecting that free cash flow will rise from £1.5bn to approximately £2bn over the same period. BT’s Openreach arm had connected almost 23 million premises to full-fibre broadband by the end of March and expects to complete the rollout this year.
The combination of surging executive pay, mass redundancies, and declining revenues places BT’s governance and labour practices under renewed scrutiny at a moment when the company is reshaping itself for a post-infrastructure-build future.