Earnings And Employment From Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, Uk: May 2022

17th May 2022

From the Office for National Statistics published today 17th May 2022. Here is selection of excerpts.

1.Main points
Early estimates for April 2022 indicate that the number of payrolled employees rose by 4.2% compared with April 2021, a rise of 1,187,000 employees; the number of payrolled employees was up by 1.8% since February 2020, a rise of 530,000.

Payrolled employment increased by 0.4% in April 2022 when compared with March 2022, a rise of 121,000 people; this should be treated as an upper bound and is likely to be revised downwards when more data is received next month.

UK payrolled employee growth for March 2022 compared with February 2022 has been revised from an increase of 35,000 reported in our last publication to an increase of 59,000, because of the incorporation of additional real time information (RTI) submissions into the statistics, which takes place every publication and reduces the need for imputation.

Early estimates for April 2022 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 5.6% compared with April 2021, and increased by 11.7% when compared with February 2020.

All age groups saw an increase in payrolled employees between April 2021 and April 2022; there was an increase of 503,000 payrolled employees aged under 25 years.

For Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 regions, annual growth in payrolled employees in April 2022 was highest in Tower Hamlets, with a rise of 11.6%, and lowest in Warrington, with a rise of 1.6%.

The increase in payrolled employees between April 2021 and April 2022 was largest in the accommodation and food service activities sector (a rise of 333,000 employees) and smallest in the construction sector (a rise of 3,000).

This month, NUTS1 regions are further broken down by sectors in the supporting datasets for this bulletin; some sectors show similar growth rates to the region level, while others, such as accommodation and food service activities, and transportation and storage, show moderate regional variation.

Annual growth in median pay for employees in April 2022 was highest in the other service activities sector (an increase of 9.3%), and lowest in the education sector (an increase of 2.4%).

Annual growth rates for April 2022 are compared with April 2021, and so the reduction in employees and median pay seen following the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is no longer contributing to the annual growth rate. Annual growth rates are now compared with this lower baseline.

2.Payrolled employees
Early estimates for April 2022 indicate that there were 29.5 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a rise of 4.2% compared with the same period of the previous year. This means a rise of 1,187,000 people over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees increased by 0.4% in April 2022, which is equivalent to 121,000 people. The early estimate for April 2022 shows the first fall in the annual growth rate since early 2021, but still shows relatively high growth. This fall in the growth rate will be partially driven by the comparison against the increase in employee numbers in March 2021, the first substantial increase since January 2020.

This monthly growth of 121,000 should be treated as an upper bound, because it is based on an early estimate of April 2022 employees. Over the last 10 months, these early estimates have been revised downwards by an average of 109,000 employees. The effect of these revisions on the monthly growth is normally mitigated by revisions to the previous month's employees. However, historic trends indicate that the revisions to March 2022 employees will be relatively small in the next month's publication. Therefore, if April 2022 employees are revised next month consistently with the last 10 months, the monthly growth between March and April 2022 is likely to be substantially reduced.

When comparing the number of payrolled employees in March 2022 with the previous month, the number increased by 0.2%. This is revised upwards from the early estimate of a 0.1% increase, reported in our previous version of this bulletin, published in April 2022. A comparison of the early estimate for April 2022 against the early estimate for March 2022 from last month's bulletin would show a negative change. However, in this bulletin, because of the revision to March, we still see positive growth between March and April. The latest revised estimates are more accurate and are the ones that should be used for a comparison. More information on revisions can be found in the Strengths and Limitations section.

Growth rates before mid-2016 were higher than 1.5%, falling to then stay level within a range of 1.0% to 1.5% until 2019 (Figure 2).

Starting around early 2019, employee growth began a slight downward trend. However, employee growth slowed more substantially past March 2020, coinciding with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, becoming negative in April 2020.

At the start of 2021, growth rates began to recover, and have since remained high as the labour market continues to recover from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

3.Median monthly pay
Early estimates for April 2022 indicate that median monthly pay was £2,076, an increase of 5.6% compared with the same period of the previous year.

Following a general trend of increasing pay growth between mid-2015 and mid-2018, pay growth fluctuated around 3.6% until 2020, when pay growth became negative. This coincided with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and related economic and policy responses. From June 2020, median pay growth has been positive, and is now above pre-coronavirus pandemic (February 2020) levels.

In the three months to March 2022, the 10th percentile of the monthly pay distribution was £685, the 90th percentile was £4,903, and the 99th percentile was £14,333 (Figure 5). This means that:

10% of payrolled employees earned equal to or less than £685 per month

90% of payrolled employees earned equal to or less than £4,903 per month

99% of payrolled employees earned equal to or less than £14,333 per month

National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage
The National Minimum Wage (NMW) is a minimum amount per hour that most workers in the UK are entitled to be payrolled. There are different rates of minimum wage depending on a worker's age and whether they are an apprentice. The NMW applies to employees aged 16 to 24 years. The government's National Living Wage (NLW) was introduced on 1 April 2016 and applies to employees aged 25 years and over.

In April 2022, the NMW and NLW rates were:

£9.50 for employees aged 23 years and over

£9.18 for employees aged 21 to 22 years

£6.83 for employees aged 18 to 20 years

£4.81 for employees aged under 18 years

£4.81 for apprentices aged under 19 years and those aged 19 years or over who are in the first year of their apprenticeship.

To read the full report with many more links and graphs go HERE