
“I can see that you’re going to die laughing, but we genuinely don’t feel like we have a quality of life to sing about,” says James, one of London’s so-called Henrys. Director of a digital strategy company, he is profoundly dissatisfied with his lot. ‘Henry’ stands for High Earner, Not Rich Yet. And London is full of them: people on good salaries who are suddenly struggling. James talks me through the truth about the section of society whose members earn more than £100,000 a year but who barely make ends meet. “The problems facing us are legion,” he says. And mad as it sounds, James has a point. Just 10 years ago a Henry would have been able to live in a nice — or soon to be nice — area, eat at some delicious restaurants, go on smart holidays and might even be able to swing the fees of a kid or two at private school. Not any longer.
The ‘Henry’ moniker might conjure up images of a blustering red trouser wearer fresh from Eton and now living Chelsea. In fact, these are London’s pushed-out middle classes: hard-working, high-taxpaying, high achievers who work long hours in gruelling jobs and aspire to a modest life — and yet are having this aspiration endlessly penalised. Under the current government, success is becoming ever harder, and it’s turning Britain into a place where you can’t seem to get ahead. No wonder so many are moving abroad, or at least considering it.

The great fiscal challenge is tax. “We would be much richer if I made £99,999.99. The day I was given a raise was the day we went broke,” James explains. He’s referring to the 60 per cent tax trap which faces those who clock in with salaries between £100,000 and £125,140 and find themselves shelling out a “nut-shrinking” 60 per cent tax on this portion of their earnings.
The reality is that the £12,570 tax-free personal allowance dwindles away at a rate of £1 for every extra £2 you earn after the seemingly aspirational benchmark of a sweet £100,000 salary is hit. Practically speaking, this can mean that for every £100 of income you earn between £100,000 and £125,140, you’ll take home £40. Only just enough for a Pret lunch, a daily travelcard and a modest family supper. That leaves scarcely anything for savings and no way to muster enough cash for the deposit on a house. A four-bedroom terraced house in Peckham or Walthamstow can now cost as much as £1 million — 10 years ago it would have been half that.
A Henry in London with two children under five who earns £99,999 will have more disposable income than someone earning £149,000
On top of this, the seemingly high salary of a Henry disqualifies him from many of the state’s boons, such as the free childcare allowance. Once your taxable income reaches £100,000 you don’t get the full 30 hours of free childcare but a measly maximum of 15 hours instead. You also lose the tax-free childcare benefit, which is worth up to £2,000.
When sending two children to nursery costs an eye-watering £3,000 to £5,000 a month, this amounts to a stark fact: a Henry in London with two children under five who earns £99,999 will have more disposable income than someone earning £149,000. Things are set to get worse if Labour proceeds with autumn tax rises, which are predicted to hit middle-class workers the hardest. Londoners have had to watch while America’s GDP has skyrocketed over the past five years and ours has stayed stubbornly static. What this means is that while Britons earn the same as they did in 2020, they have to pay prices that have increased by at least two per cent each year.
Henrys and Henriettas are disproportionately hit by inflation and the cost of living that should be within their grasp. “London is the worst place in the world to be stuck between two benches,” says one Henrietta, an interior designer. “I’ve been looking to buy a flat for five years, but can’t afford anything. I need an office.
“I have a few savings but have not added to them for at least two years despite earning more these days”
“At the moment I can only afford the rent on my flat because my mum helps out, and pays my council tax for me. But my flat is so small she has to sleep on a futon under my desk in the second room where I work. I have a few savings but have not added to them for at least two years despite earning more these days.”
Her predicament is keenly felt. A report by HSBC UK — Your Money’s Worth: Defining Wealth in 2025 — showed that nine in 10 high earners don’t consider themselves to be wealthy, and only one per cent of the entire country would call themselves rich.
There will be some of you shaking your fist at these pages; how could you earn more than £100,000 and still not consider yourself rich? But many of the middle-class grievances are legitimate. These are the folk who worked hard at university and are slogging away at demanding and stressful jobs, but because the price of everything has shot up, from housing and mortgages to nursery and groceries, their life is a battle.
“It’s like struggling up a steep and slippery hill, and every time you seem to get some traction you slip down again,” says Ben, a senior director of an international auction house. “The system is designed against you, and there are the endless exterior blows that keep coming. Liz Truss and Covid were the big ones.” The schools and holidays of bygone high earners are now things of the past. “We can’t go to Europe with the kids; even Wales is a stretch these days. And private school is a joke,” says Lucy, a TV executive.
Dreaming of Dubai
Gone are the days of fearsome but in some cases manageable £6,000-a-term school fees — these days, because of the VAT rise on private schools which Labour brought in, lots of London day schools demand a terrifying £10,000. Lucy is right on the holiday front, too. With a trip abroad during school holidays more expensive than ever, a modest week at a nice resort is out of reach for the majority. Even the traditional saver’s fall-back of a staycation can see you priced out of the market — a modest house in Cornwall for a family of four will cost about £3,000 for aweek. A stretch even on a GP’s salary.
“Of course we talk about how much more we’d be paid in somewhere like America or Dubai”
Many of the Henrys don’t see themselves ever owning their own home. As a result people are moving out of London. “Of course we talk about how much more we’d be paid in somewhere like America or Dubai and how much less tax we’d pay,” Ben says. “Or even just moving to Surrey, but still with a London income, would make things stretch.” Other plans kicked around by this ticked-off gang include going down to four days a week to bring the salary below £100,000 and get their childcare free hours or talking their parents into “selling up and shelling out”.

“Lots of friends have taken the plunge and gone to Singapore or Dubai where tax is much lower,” he explains. In Singapore you would pay 11.5 per cent on a £100,000 salary. In Dubai you do not pay any tax on UAE-acquired income, although you would still need to pay UK tax on any income earned here.
See also: How higher tax brackets in the UK compare to other major nations
Jeremy Hunt was viciously howled down when, as Chancellor, he said £100,000 “wasn’t a huge salary”, and there will always be those unsympathetic to the Henrys. Lots of them would say that the dissatisfaction is all in their heads. That they should forget keeping up with the Smythe-Joneses and smell the roses. Counselling psychologist Dr Joanna Harvey says a large number of her clients are plagued with different forms of chronic dissatisfaction and status anxiety. “In my experience it’s more of a male thing than a female one. It often presents in young men under 40 — usually with underlying feelings of inadequacy. They lack emotional skills and language and so their whole sense of self is made up of external things.” Harvey warns that there are huge pitfalls to pinning your self-worth to the “shaky sand of material trappings”.
There is an element of frustrated aspiration to their glumness. “They compare themselves with everyone, especially the boomer generation of their parents. They resent that they can’t afford to buy houses and send their children to private school,” says Harvey.
The scramble for schools
The issue for the middle classes in London now, however, is not that they are desperately wanting material possessions — this is about the fact that Britain simply isn’t working for relatively high earners now. They do have grounds to be aggrieved — they are astute enough to know quite how much we all depend on them. Henrys are crucial to our city’s economy, with 60 per cent of income tax being siphoned from the coffers of the top 10 per cent of earners who work in highly skilled professions, doing 70-hour weeks. So what happens when enough is enough, and they move away? “Britain feels like a place where you can’t succeed any more, the odds are just stacked against us,” Lucy says.
There have always been problems of the very rich: the Duchess of Devonshire used to complain that Chatsworth had too many rooms to efficiently house-train puppies and Prince Andrew used to fly into fits of fury with incompetent helicopter directions. But the point is that Henrys are not the very rich. The knock-on effects are vast, not least for private schools. And for the parents who can’t afford a fee-paying school there is the gruelling scramble to get children into good faith or state schools, which can also be a full-time occupation. If they don’t manage that, they move to the catchment area of a good state school where the house prices more than make up for it, and have to compete with others, raising the prices yet further.
Of all the Henrys I talk to, there is only one who seems to strike the perfect balance. “My husband and I both got promoted at the same time last year,” she says. “And so we had a — for us — very rational discussion. We agreed on these things: I was allowed to occasionally shop at Reiss, Toast and Cos instead of Asos. He was allowed to buy one or two tickets to professional football matches and doesn’t have to rely on the school fixtures to get his hit of live sport. We would go to resorts on holiday, not rented flats. We obviously still go Ryanair but priority boarding. Oh and Ocado. I never have to set foot in another supermarket. This is what I call aspiration fulfilled.” If only all Henrys had it so good.