WPP has more than doubled its staff incentive pool to £130m despite continuing pressure on revenues and a restructuring programme that has seen more than 1,200 jobs cut during the first half of the year.
The advertising giant set aside £130m for incentives during the first six months of 2026, up 120.3% from just £59m during the same period last year and approaching the £148m recorded in H1 2024.
The increase adds another dimension to WPP’s half-year results, which sent its shares soaring by around 27% last week as investors backed early signs that chief executive Cindy Rose’s turnaround strategy is beginning to gain traction.
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As Prolific North reported last week, WPP’s revenue fell more than 3% year-on-year to £6.4bn during the first half, while revenue less pass-through costs declined by almost 5% to £4.7bn.
The group also cut a further 1,267 roles during the period, taking its workforce down 6.4% over the past 12 months to 104,083 employees. Staff costs fell by £216m to £3.7bn as WPP continued a restructuring programme designed to simplify the business and reduce duplication.
But alongside those savings, WPP is rebuilding an incentive pot which fell sharply last year amid weaker business performance.
The £130m set aside during H1 compares with £59m a year earlier and puts the figure close to the £148m recorded during the equivalent period of 2024.
Rose, who took over from Mark Read as chief executive in September 2025, has also changed the way bonuses are calculated as part of her wider attempt to encourage WPP’s businesses to operate more closely together.
Under the new model, half of an employee’s bonus is linked to the performance of their division, with the other half tied to the performance of WPP as a whole.
Explaining the thinking behind the change, Rose previously said: “When everybody’s paid on WPP’s overall performance, you unlock collaboration, resource-sharing, client obsession – you unlock a lot of great things. I think that’s going to be really transformational for us.”
WPP said in its latest reporting that “common incentive models [were] driving more effective cross-unit collaboration”.
Chief financial officer Joanne Wilson said during the company’s investor call that the rebuilding of the incentive pool would continue during the second half.
“We did start to rebuild our incentives in the first half, but again, they’re very much skewed to the second half.
“Last year, because of our performance, our incentives were at an unusually low level. In 2026, as part of our planning assumptions, we are assuming that we will rebuild our incentive pot. We’ve done some of that in H1 and we’ll carry on with that rebuild in the second half. Certainly, they will be higher than they were in 2025 is our current expectation, and probably closer to levels that you saw in 2024.”
The incentive changes form part of Rose’s Elevate28 strategy, which has simplified WPP into four core divisions – WPP Media, WPP Creative, WPP Production and WPP Enterprise Solutions – as the group attempts to stabilise the business before returning to growth.
Across the whole of 2025, WPP paid £181m in bonuses, down 50% from £363m in 2024. WPP said the reduction was “due to business performance against annual incentive targets and the disposal of FGS Global”.
