NatWest Profit Surges 24% to £7.7bn as CEO Pay Hits £6.6m and Bonus Pool Swells

A bumper 2025 for Britain’s state-backed banking heavyweight is sharpening the debate around executive rewards, staff bonuses, and how long high earnings can last as interest rates start to matter in a different way.

Updated: Friday, 13 February 2026 (UK) • By Swikblog

What’s driving the profit jump. NatWest’s headline figure — a £7.7 billion operating pre-tax profit for 2025 — reflects broad growth across its core customer businesses, with retail banking income rising 15% as customer deposits increased and the group absorbed fresh balances from the Sainsbury’s Bank acquisition. Mortgage balances also expanded, helped by the £2.3 billion portfolio taken on from Metro Bank, a reminder that scale can still be built in lumpy, opportunistic steps rather than only through organic lending.

Investors often cheer earnings beats, but they also price the “after” — what profits look like when rates, competition, and funding costs shift. That’s why the pay and bonuses angle lands so hard: NatWest lifted its bonus pool to £495 million, while chief executive Paul Thwaite’s total 2025 pay rose to £6.6 million, including a £1.5 million annual bonus payable in early 2026 and long-term share awards worth £2.5 million. In a year when households are still budgeting hard, it’s a contrast that draws attention even when the bank’s operational momentum is real.

Rates are the quiet co-author. UK banks live and die by the rate cycle, and the Bank of England holding Bank Rate at 3.75% this month keeps a firm floor under lending margins while the industry watches for signs of a gentler path ahead. If you want a clean, primary-source reference for the rate decision, it’s laid out directly by the Bank of England. For NatWest, that rate backdrop matters because it shapes everything from deposit pricing to how aggressively the bank competes for new mortgage business.

Where the broader market sits. NatWest is reporting into a UK equities tape that has been jittery around global risk sentiment. The FTSE 100 closed at 10,402.44 on Thursday (Feb 12), after trading between 10,391.98 and 10,535.76, a swing that captures how quickly “record high” chatter can turn into a defensive mood. The FTSE 250 also slipped on the day. For bank stocks, that kind of backdrop can amplify reactions to any line item investors interpret as “peak profitability” — even if the annual result looks undeniably strong.

The acquisitions narrative is doing heavy lifting. A million Sainsbury’s Bank customers coming across is the sort of “quiet scale” banks crave: sticky balances, more cross-sell potential, and a wider runway for everyday products. The planned purchase of Evelyn Partners for £2.7 billion is a different bet — less about mass-market volumes and more about building a larger, steadier wealth engine to serve affluent clients, particularly if lending spreads narrow later in the cycle.

NatWest’s profit strength gives it room to talk about ambition, but the public conversation is likely to orbit around distribution and fairness: the bigger bonus pool, the CEO’s higher package, and how the bank explains those choices while still pitching itself as a customer-first franchise. For investors, the key is whether growth can remain “broad-based” without relying on a single tailwind — and whether wealth and private banking expansion genuinely makes the earnings base less rate-sensitive over time.