Theresa Mary Brasier was born on 1 October 1956 in Eastbourne, East Sussex, the only child of Hubert Brasier, a Church of England clergyman, and Zaidee Mary Barnes. Her father died in 1981 from injuries sustained in a car crash, and her mother died of multiple sclerosis the following year. She grew up largely in Oxfordshire, where her father held a parish, and was educated at Heythrop Primary School, St Juliana’s Convent School, and Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School, which became part of the comprehensive Wheatley Park School while she was a pupil there. She read geography at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, graduating in 1977. She met fellow student Philip May at an Oxford University Conservative Association dance, reportedly introduced by a fellow student, Benazir Bhutto; the two married in 1980. Philip May went on to a long career in fund management, most recently as a senior relationship manager for the asset manager Capital Group, and the couple have no children.

After Oxford, May worked at the Bank of England from 1977 to 1983, then for the financial-industry body that became the Association for Payment Clearing Services (APACS), where she rose to Head of the European Affairs Unit and later Senior Adviser on International Affairs. She served as a councillor on the London Borough of Merton from 1986 to 1994, including a period chairing its education committee, while twice standing unsuccessfully for Parliament, in North West Durham in 1992 and in a Barking by-election in 1994. She was elected MP for the newly created constituency of Maidenhead in 1997 and held a series of shadow cabinet posts before becoming the first woman to serve as Conservative Party chairman in 2002. Appointed Home Secretary by David Cameron on 12 May 2010, she became the longest continuously serving holder of that office in more than 60 years, remaining in post until 13 July 2016 and overseeing government policy on immigration, policing, and counter-terrorism through two general elections.

May entered the 2016 Conservative leadership contest after David Cameron resigned following the UK’s referendum vote to leave the European Union, and became Prime Minister unopposed on 13 July 2016 once her remaining rivals withdrew. Her premiership was dominated by Brexit: she triggered Article 50 in March 2017, called and lost her parliamentary majority in a snap general election that June, and spent more than two years negotiating a withdrawal agreement with the European Union that MPs rejected three times in early 2019. She resigned as Conservative leader on 7 June 2019 and left Downing Street on 24 July 2019 when Boris Johnson succeeded her, remaining a backbench MP for Maidenhead.

May continued in the Commons for nearly five more years, campaigning on causes including modern slavery — legislation she had introduced as Home Secretary — and mental health, and serving on select and liaison committees, before announcing in March 2024 that she would not seek re-election. She stood down when Parliament was dissolved for the July 2024 general election, after 27 years as Maidenhead’s MP, and was made a life peer, Baroness May of Maidenhead, in the dissolution honours list published that August, taking her seat in the House of Lords. Each of her post-office earning activities is documented in the sections below.

May’s income from public office was fixed by statute throughout her government career. As Home Secretary from 2010 to 2016, she was paid the salary set by Parliament for Cabinet-rank Secretaries of State, a figure the coalition and Conservative governments held flat for most of that period under a post-2010 freeze on ministerial pay; her separate MP’s salary for Maidenhead stood at £74,962 a year from April 2016, the standard rate paid to all backbench and ministerial MPs alike. As Prime Minister, she entered office in July 2016 on a combined salary of £150,402 a year — the same total her predecessor, David Cameron, had been paid, since successive Cabinets declined ministerial pay rises that were frozen government-wide — and left office in July 2019 on £154,908, the modest rise reflecting periodic increases to the underlying MP-salary component rather than any increase to the ministerial premium itself.

Since leaving Downing Street in 2019, May has not received a pension specific to being a former Prime Minister; unlike the U.S. system, the UK provides former premiers only a Public Duty Costs Allowance of up to £115,000 a year, reimbursed against invoiced office and secretarial costs rather than paid as personal income. Her main disclosed income since 2019 has come from paid speaking, arranged largely through the Washington Speakers Bureau and paid to a personal company, The Office of Theresa May Limited, from which she draws a fixed salary of £85,000 a year, a rate unchanged since 1 September 2020; the remainder of the fees the company receives goes toward staff, office costs, and her charitable work rather than to her personally. The House of Commons Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and subsequent reporting by Sky News and Tortoise Media’s Westminster Accounts project, put the gross value of speeches booked through her company at more than £2.5 million between December 2019 and January 2023 alone — the highest outside income of any MP over that period — with individual engagements regularly running into six figures.

May’s only disclosed publishing contract is for her memoir “The Abuse of Power: Confronting Injustice in Public Life,” acquired by Headline Publishing Group via her literary agent, Curtis Brown, and published on 14 September 2023. The book, which examines episodes including the Hillsborough disaster, the Windrush scandal, and the Post Office Horizon scandal, became a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller. The House of Commons register shows Headline paid three advance instalments of £20,500 each, in May, July, and September 2023, plus £1,640 for recording the audiobook, all routed through The Office of Theresa May Limited; no total advance figure or royalty terms beyond those disclosed instalments have been made public, so the full value of the contract cannot be independently verified. A related, book-linked payment came from a promotional talk for Google UK in September 2023, for which Google purchased 850 copies of the book, generating two further disclosed payments of £8,165.06 and £6,885 to her publisher.

Beyond the book, her disclosed contracts consist almost entirely of individual speaking engagements rather than a standing retainer deal. Entries in the House of Commons Register of Members’ Financial Interests include £121,700 for an address to the Lesher Foundation in California in March 2023, £71,000 from the law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd in May 2023, roughly £108,430 for a speech to Aditya Birla Management Corporation in India in September 2023, £108,600 for a talk at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania in October 2023, and £103,000 for an address to the Credit Union National Association in Wisconsin in March 2024. Earlier engagements reported in the press include a £136,000 speech to the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul in September 2020 and more than £400,000 for a run of six talks organized by the Cambridge Speaker Series in the United States in 2022. Each fee is registered separately as it is paid rather than under a single standing contract, so no single “book deal”-style headline figure exists for her speaking business the way it does for some other former leaders profiled on this site.

As with other former heads of government profiled on this site, May has not pursued conventional paid product endorsements or brand ambassador deals. Her commercial activity since leaving office has run through paid speeches, her memoir, and continued parliamentary and, from 2024, House of Lords service, covered in the sections above and below. No reliable public reporting documents a conventional endorsement deal for her, and none is claimed here.

May’s registered financial interests disclose no company directorships, non-executive board seats, or shareholdings above the 15% threshold that MPs and peers must declare; her House of Commons register entries since 2019 list only her speaking and book income, gifts and hospitality such as recurring use of an airport lounge suite at Heathrow, and an honorary, unpaid life presidency of the Henley Festival. Her income-generating vehicle is The Office of Theresa May Limited, a private company incorporated in October 2019 to receive speaking and book fees, employ support staff, and fund her charitable and public work; UK company filings show it held cash of roughly £1.4 million and a net asset position of about £1.2 million as of its most recent accounts. This is a business balance sheet used to run her office rather than a personal investment portfolio, and no further personal shareholdings or business interests have been made public.

May and her husband have kept a low public profile around their property, consistent with UK press coverage that has repeatedly described a comparatively modest lifestyle for a former Prime Minister. Contemporaneous 2017 reporting valued their family home in the Berkshire village of Sonning, within her former Maidenhead constituency, at around £600,000, and a separate London property at around £1 million. House prices in Sonning have risen substantially since then, with estate agents reporting an average sale price approaching £1 million by the mid-2020s, so both properties are likely worth more today, though no updated valuation has been published. No other real estate has been publicly reported in May’s name or her husband’s.