SharePoint Developer vs Workday Specialist: Salary & Career Benchmarks in the UK

In the UK, Workday Specialist roles typically command a higher median salary than SharePoint Developer positions. According to our 2026 live benchmark data, a mid-level Workday Specialist earns a median salary of £66K, whereas a SharePoint Developer brings in roughly £53K (a gap of £13K at the median).

Seniority, tech stack, and location all move this gap. Senior practitioners in either discipline can exceed the upper range through specialist skills. See the skills premium section below for the specific certifications and tools that push offers to the top of the range.

While both positions are vital to a modern tech organisation, SharePoint Developer and Workday Specialist have fundamentally different daily workflows.

SharePoint Developer focuses primarily on designing, building, and maintaining SharePoint Online and SPFx solutions for enterprise collaboration, document management, and intranet portals within Microsoft 365 and Azure ecosystems. Day-to-day work revolves around developing SharePoint Framework SPFx web parts and extensions using React and TypeScript, designing and configuring SharePoint Online site collections and content types, building Power Automate workflows for document approvals, integrating SharePoint with Teams and Azure Active Directory, supporting migration projects from on-premises SharePoint to SharePoint Online, and providing technical documentation and user training.

Workday Specialist focuses on configuring, implementing, and supporting Workday HCM, Payroll, Finance, and Planning modules as a functional consultant, system administrator, or integration developer partnering with HR, Finance, and IT teams. Their time is spent configuring Workday HCM business processes, security groups, and organisational structures, building and maintaining Workday reports and dashboards using Report Writer and BIRT, developing Workday Studio integrations and EIB inbound and outbound files, troubleshooting system issues and managing Workday service tickets, supporting Workday payroll configuration and parallel run testing, preparing for bi-annual Workday feature releases, and documenting configuration changes and business process flows.

Transitioning between these two paths is achievable but requires targeted upskilling.

Moving from SharePoint Developer to Workday Specialist: HR Business Analysts, Payroll Managers with system experience, HRIS Managers, and SAP HCM or Oracle HR consultants commonly transition into Workday Specialist roles by obtaining Workday certifications and building configuration experience.

Moving from Workday Specialist to SharePoint Developer: ASP.NET developers, IT administrators with SharePoint experience, and Power Platform developers commonly transition into SharePoint Developer roles by upskilling on SPFx and modern SharePoint development patterns.

Neither path requires starting from scratch. Professionals in both roles share underlying technology fluency; the gap is usually domain knowledge and specific tooling rather than core engineering fundamentals.

In the UK in 2026, both roles are seeing demand, but with different drivers.

SharePoint Developer demand is steady, particularly in Public sector and NHS digital delivery teams, led by employers such as Avanade and Capgemini. Workday Specialist demand is very high, concentrated in Insurance and asset management platform teams, led by employers such as Accenture and Deloitte.

Workspace flexibility significantly impacts total compensation value in the UK.

SharePoint Developer roles score 80% on our remote-friendliness index (Remote-Friendly). This is because SharePoint development is highly amenable to remote working, with most development, testing, and deployment activities conducted through cloud environments accessible from anywhere, and UK employers outside financial services have generally left this flexibility in place through 2026. Where in-office attendance is required, it is typically driven by Initial project discovery, stakeholder workshops, and user acceptance testing occasionally require on-site presence, particularly at public sector clients in Dublin and London, plus the three- or four-day office mandates now standard at the large UK banks and insurers.

Workday Specialist roles score 80% (Remote-Friendly). Workday configuration, reporting, integration development, and support activities are cloud-based and fully performable remotely, making Workday Specialist one of the most remote-compatible ERP roles in the market, a pattern that has held up in the UK outside the banks and insurers now mandating more office time is the primary driver of flexibility. When office days are required, it is usually for Go-live cutover activities, payroll parallel run testing, and key stakeholder workshops during Workday implementation projects often benefit from on-site attendance, particularly for programme governance and change management activities, though the UK's public sector and NHS employers now expect this in person as standard practice.