UK jobs and pay: employment, unemployment and wages

💡 How to read the industry figures ✕

It is the industry of someone's last job

Not the industry they are looking to join, and not where they work now. Somebody made redundant from a shop who is now applying for warehouse work still counts under shops & motor trade until they start the new job. It also means anyone who has never worked, or has not worked for years, appears in no industry at all — which is why these fourteen rates sit below the national unemployment rate and do not average out to it.

Read the rate down the column, the count across the row

The rate is the one that compares fairly between industries, because it already accounts for how big each one is: a large industry always has a large count. The count is what tells you whether a change is a lot of people or a handful. A percentage change on a small industry can be a few thousand people.

A falling count is not automatically good news

An industry that is shrinking has fewer people left in it to lose their jobs, so its count of unemployed can fall while the work disappears. That is why the rate for ten years ago is printed beside today's — if the count fell and the rate did not, the industry got smaller rather than safer.

Why there is no month-by-month figure

These come from the Labour Force Survey, a sample survey, and since 2018 each period is a rolling three months. Two periods next to each other share two months of the same respondents, so a "change since last month" is mostly the same people counted twice. We show the year and the ten years, which is also what ONS advises: read the long movements, not the short ones.

Ten years is as far back as we will go

ONS recoded industry from the 1992 classification to the 2007 one at the start of 2009 and says the effect "is significant for some of the industry sectors", with no adjustment made to the series. A twenty-year comparison would cross that and would not be comparing like with like. There is also a reweighting from January 2019 that puts a step in the ten-year figures — real, published, and worth knowing about before reading too much into any one of them.

What "small sample" means

ONS shades the estimates it considers based on a small sample; we carry that flag straight through rather than presenting every figure at the same confidence. Treat a flagged row as a direction, not a measurement.

And what it cannot tell you

Nothing about pay, nothing about which jobs are being created, and nothing about degree subjects — graduate outcomes by course are a different dataset entirely (the Department for Education's LEO figures), on a different definition, and cannot be put on the same scale as these.

ONS UNEM03, unemployment by previous industrial sector, Labour Force Survey. Published monthly under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

💼 What these numbers mean for your job and pay ✕

Two different unemployment numbers — read the right one

The unemployment rate comes from a survey (anyone jobless and actively looking, claiming or not) — the economist's number, national and slow. The claimant count is people claiming unemployment benefits — barely any of it is Jobseeker's Allowance these days; it's almost all Universal Credit with a requirement to seek work, plus a little New Style JSA. It's published monthly right down to ward level, which makes it the timely, local signal — that's the one this tile tracks for your area.

Real pay — pay measured against prices

Cash pay rises average 3.4%; with inflation at 2.8%, the average pay rise is worth +0.3% in real terms after prices (ONS measure). In any review or job offer, the comparison point is inflation, not zero: an offer below 2.8% is a reduction in real terms.

What a soft market changes in practice

Vacancies at their lowest since 2021 plus a rising claimant count means more applicants per job: moving jobs gets harder and riskier, employers regain negotiating power, and the premium for switching shrinks. It's the classic moment to consolidate — build the case for progression where you're already valued — and if you are job-hunting, expect longer searches and lean on the support that comes with the claim (work coaches, training budgets) rather than going it alone.

Why we show your ward, not just the nation

National rates hide huge local variation — neighbouring wards in the same borough can differ sharply, and your ward is the job market you actually live in. Ward-level claimant data updates monthly via Nomis, one of the very few economic numbers that exists at that scale.

So what does this mean for me, here?

Read the tile's local claimant figure against the national rate shown beside it. Lower than national generally means a tighter local labour market — fewer people chasing each vacancy, a little more negotiating room for you. Higher means more competition per job and typically longer searches. The single most useful thing is the direction over a few months, not any one month's number: a steady local rise is an early warning the area's employers are shedding, often visible before anything makes the news.

Which industries? This tile can't tell you — here's what can

The claimant count doesn't say which industries people left, and we won't pretend otherwise. For that, the ONS publishes employment by industry for your local authority (Business Register and Employment Survey, on Nomis's local labour-market profiles) — it shows which sectors dominate where you live, which is usually more telling than any national headline: a national retail downturn matters far more in a town where retail is the biggest employer.

What to look out for

Three signals worth a monthly glance: your local claimant trend (this tile), the national vacancies trend (fewer vacancies per jobseeker = cooling market), and pay against inflation — if the CPI figure on the Money tile outruns typical pay rises, "real" pay is falling even when payslips grow. None of these is advice; they're the same three dials economists watch, pointed at your postcode.

Sources: ONS Labour Force Survey & claimant count (live series), Nomis for local. General information, not financial or careers advice.

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