UK Labour Market Statistics

Key figures

• In February to April 2025, the number of people aged 16+ in employment was 34.01 million, and the employment rate for people aged 16-64 was 75.1%. Employment levels increased by around 667,000 over the last year, and the employment rate also increased.
• Labour Force Survey (LFS) data is less reliable than usual at the moment, and the ONS have said that the estimates from this survey should be considered alongside other labour market sources, such as the workforce jobs series or the estimates for payrolled employees using PAYE data.

        The increase in employment of 667,000 over the year to February to April 2025 compares to:

• A fall of 51,000 payrolled employees in the year to February to April 2025.
• An increase of 305,000 jobs in the year to March 2025. The workforce jobs series is published every quarter and the figures for June 2025 will be published in September.

  Although LFS data suggests there has been an increase in employment over the quarter to February to April  2025, the number of payrolled employees fell by 78,000 in this period. Early estimates suggest there was a further fall in payrolled employees in May 2025 compared to April 2025.

• The UK unemployment rate was 4.6%, and 1.64 million people aged 16+ were unemployed. Unemployment levels increased by around 115,000 over the last year, and the unemployment rate also increased.
• 9.19 million people aged 16-64 were economically inactive, and the inactivity rate was 21.3%. Both inactivity levels and the inactivity rate fell over the last year.
• Vacancies fell over the year to 736,000 in March to May 2025, and are below pre-pandemic levels.
• Average wages increased in real (inflation-adjusted) terms in the three months to April 2025, with an annual change of 2.3% including bonuses and 2.1% excluding bonuses. Nominal wages rose at a rate of 5.3% including bonuses and 5.2% excluding bonuses.

Reliability of Labour Force Survey data

In February 2024, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reintroduced Labour Force Survey (LFS) data, after issues with data. This is after only limited experimental headline data was published between October 2023 and January 2024 due to falling response rates. In December 2024, the ONS reweighted some labour market data with new population estimates.

The ONS have said that the reintroduced LFS estimates should be treated with additional caution. Due to time constraints, data has only been reweighted from January to March 2019 onwards. This means there is a break in the data. The ONS has remodelled data back to June to August 2011 for the headline measures (employment, unemployment and economic inactivity).

This briefing provides the statistics that have been published by the ONS, but these statistics should be treated with more caution than usual. Section 1 provides further information.

The Library’s Economy dashboard provides more labour market data.