There’s been a lot of discussion about the decline in UK academic pay. I recently wondered when, exactly, it happened to me.

I became a lecturer in 2000 and a professor in 2012. Professors at Plymouth don’t get automatic increments: we receive the general cost-of-living increases, while any additional increase has to be applied for and awarded on performance. I’ve had two of those, most recently in 2020.

This makes it possible to do a reasonably clean calculation. Keep those performance increases, but replace the general university pay increases with inflation. What would I be earning now?

The answer is about £91,000 — roughly £13,000 more than I actually earn.

What surprised me, though, wasn’t the size of the gap. It was when it appeared.

For most of the period from 2012 to 2020, my salary broadly kept pace with inflation. There are small differences depending on precisely how you do the calculation, but essentially nothing much happens.

Then it falls off a cliff.

The turning point is the pandemic. The gap starts opening around 2020–21 and becomes large during the inflation surge that follows. By 2022, the difference between my actual salary and the inflation-linked version was already approaching £10,000 a year. It has continued to grow since.

So, for me at least, the story isn’t really one of thirty years of steadily declining academic pay. It’s more peculiar than that. I spent the first twenty years of my academic career broadly maintaining my position. Then, in about six years, a substantial chunk of the real value of my salary disappeared.

I’m not pleading poverty here. I’m fortunate to be well paid, and there are plenty of people for whom recent inflation has had much more serious consequences.

But I do think this illustrates something interesting about inflation. Nothing obvious happened to me professionally. I wasn’t demoted, didn’t reduce my hours, and didn’t take a less demanding job. Quite the reverse.

There was no moment when anyone decided my work should be worth substantially less.

Nevertheless, compared with 2020, it now is.

Inflation is quite good at making pay cuts look like pay rises.