HSBC UK: The Branches It Shut, the British Jobs It Cut, and the Indian Jobs It Grew

HSBC made $232.8 billion in profit. It shut more than 700 British branches. It cut 11,362 British jobs. And it added 15,107 jobs in India.

That isn’t our spin. These are HSBC’s own audited figures, filed every year under UK law.

What those 11,362 salaries paid for

Every one of those jobs was a wage that kept a household going. In 2025, HSBC advertised cashier and customer-service roles at about £24,000–£25,000 a year; Payscale’s self-reported average for a cashier is lower, at £18,277. None of that money is spare. In Britain, a salary at that level pays for:

• A mortgage. In August 2025, Rightmove put a typical first-time buyer’s monthly mortgage payment at £909. That is about £10,900 a year, close to half the take-home pay of a full-time branch cashier.
• Raising children. The Child Poverty Action Group calculates that raising a child to 18 costs a couple about £250,000. That basic cost does not include rent or childcare.
• A wedding. Hitched puts the average UK wedding in 2025 at £21,990, close to a full year’s gross pay for a branch cashier.
• Clearing debt. These are the household budgets with no slack. Lose the salary and a credit card, car loan or overdraft becomes a crisis.

Multiply those household budgets by the 11,362 fewer people HSBC now employs in Britain. Each of those posts was a mortgage being paid, children being fed and clothed, and savings going into the local economy.

While those wages disappeared from British towns, the bank kept growing somewhere else. In 2008, HSBC had around 1,500 branches in Britain. Today it has 327. Since 2021 it has employed more people in India than in the country where it is headquartered. And over the last twelve years, HSBC paid more corporation tax in India ($5.03 billion) than in the UK ($3.86 billion). In 2020, its UK companies paid $1 million.

Here is the bank’s own paperwork, line by line.

The numbers, year by year

Headcount. In 2014, HSBC averaged 43,987 staff in the UK and 31,303 in India. By 2025, the UK figure was down to 32,625, a fall of 26%. The India figure was up to 46,410, a rise of 48%. In 2021, for the first time, HSBC employed more people in India (38,589) than in Britain (36,536), the country where it is headquartered. It has done so every year since.

Tax. In 2020, HSBC’s UK companies paid $1 million in UK corporation tax. The same year, its Indian companies paid $484 million in Indian corporation tax. In 8 of the 12 years shown, HSBC paid more corporation tax in India than in the UK.

Profit at the UK bank itself. HSBC UK Bank plc is the ring-fenced high-street bank that runs the branches. In 2024 it made a profit before tax of $6.56 billion, and in 2025 $6.53 billion. In 2024 HSBC’s own filing states that its UK cash tax bill “was reduced by the utilisation of tax losses which were incurred in prior periods.”

How many staff worked in each branch?

HSBC does not publish staffing figures for individual branches. In the rounds where it gave both a branch count and a job count, the figures work out like this:

• 2017: 62 branches, about 180 jobs: roughly 3 staff per branch
• 2020: 10 branches, 46 jobs at risk: roughly 4.6 staff per branch
• 2022: 69 branches, about 400 jobs affected: roughly 5.8 staff per branch

Across those rounds, the average is about 4 to 5 staff per closed branch. HSBC said many branch staff were redeployed. The fall of 11,362 in its UK headcount shows how many of those jobs, together with head-office, call-centre and technology roles, were never replaced in Britain.

Branch closures are only part of the job losses. In 2015, HSBC said up to 8,000 UK jobs would go as part of a global plan to cut 50,000 roles.

The work that moved to India

HSBC first moved British jobs to Asia on a large scale in October 2003. It announced that about 4,000 UK processing and call-centre jobs would move to Asia, mainly India, and that its four UK administrative processing centres would close. In 2016, it said around 840 UK IT roles, many in Sheffield and Barnsley, would move to India, China and Poland. In 2017, around 200 more UK IT jobs were moved overseas at the same time as the 62-branch closure round.

HSBC’s India operation is now one of its biggest anywhere. According to HSBC’s own careers site, more than 23,000 technology staff work in its centres in Pune, Hyderabad and Bengaluru. Those centres support HSBC’s businesses around the world, the UK included. HSBC does not publish how many of its 46,410 India staff work on UK customers, UK accounts or UK systems. If it published that figure, customers and MPs could see exactly how much of the UK bank’s work is done in India.

Every HSBC branch closed in the UK

Which? counted 442 HSBC branch closures between January 2015 and August 2019. By the time HSBC announced its 2021 round, Which? put the total since 2015 at 555. After the 2022 and 2023 rounds, the total since 2015 is about 738 branches.

Tap a year to see every branch HSBC named in that round.

How to read these figures

• Source. UK staff, India staff, profit and corporation-tax figures come from HSBC Holdings plc’s annual Capital Requirements (Country-by-Country Reporting) filings for 2013–2025. All are in US dollars, as HSBC reports them. Staff figures are the average full-time-equivalent employees for each year. The series starts in 2014, the first year in which the filings give profit and tax and report the Channel Islands separately from the UK.
• Profit. The “Group profit before tax” column is HSBC’s worldwide reported profit. Much of it is earned in Hong Kong and Asia, not in the UK. The UK tax column covers only HSBC’s UK-resident companies. So the two columns are not a tax rate. They show how much HSBC made overall and how much it paid in UK corporation tax.
• UK bank levy. HSBC also pays the UK bank levy and the bank corporation-tax surcharge. The levy is not counted in the corporation-tax column. In 2015 it cost HSBC about $1.1 billion.
• UK figures. HSBC’s UK row in these filings also includes the holding company, HSBC Holdings plc. Its profit figure is distorted by write-downs on overseas subsidiaries, which is why this article uses the group figure and the HSBC UK Bank plc figure instead.

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Sources: HSBC Holdings plc, Capital Requirements (Country-by-Country Reporting) filings for 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025. Branch lists: City AM (2017), Jersey Evening Post/PA (2020), LBC (2021), Money Expert (2022), Yahoo Finance UK (2023), HSBC UK, 30 November 2022. Closure totals: Which? (January 2021). Jobs: IBTimes (2017), Eurofound (2015 plan), Management Issues (2003), Computer Weekly (2016), HSBC Technology India. Household costs: Rightmove via Mortgage Solutions, CPAG Cost of a Child, Hitched via The Knot Worldwide, Payscale. Figures checked 31 October 2026.