Earnings And Employment From Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, Uk: March 2023

14th March 2023

Early estimates for February 2023 indicate that the number of payrolled employees rose by 2.3% compared with February 2022, a rise of 684,000 employees; the number of payrolled employees was up by 3.6% since February 2020, a rise of 1,040,000.

Payrolled employment increased by 98,000 employees (0.3%) in February 2023 when compared with January 2023, though this should be treated as a provisional estimate and is likely to be revised when more data are received next month.

UK payrolled employee growth for January 2023 compared with December 2022 has been revised from an increase of 102,000 reported in the last bulletin to an increase of 42,000, 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 February 2023 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 6.7% compared with February 2022, and increased by 17.8% when compared with February 2020.

All age groups saw an increase in payrolled employees between February 2022 and February 2023; there was an increase of 67,000 payrolled employees aged under 25 years.

For Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 regions, annual growth in payrolled employees in February 2023 was the highest in Brent, with a rise of 5.8%, and was lowest in North Lanarkshire, with a rise of 0.5%; at local administrative unit level, growth rates varied between negative 0.7% and positive 10.9%.

The increase in payrolled employees between February 2022 and February 2023 was largest in the health and social work sector, with a rise of 158,000 employees, and smallest in the wholesale and retail sector, with a fall of 31,000.

Annual growth in median pay for employees in February 2023 was highest in the professional, scientific and technical sector, with an increase of 8.2%, and lowest in the finance and insurance sector, with an increase of 0.9%.

Payrolled employees
Early estimates for February 2023 indicate that there were 30.0 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a rise of 2.3% compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a rise of 684,000 people over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees increased by 0.3% in February 2023, which is equivalent to 98,000 people.

Note, this monthly growth of 98,000 should be treated as provisional, because it is based on an early estimate of February 2023 employees. More information on revisions can be found in Section 11: Strengths and limitations.

When comparing the number of payrolled employees in January 2023 with the previous month, the number increased by 0.1%. This is revised down from the early estimate of a 0.3% increase reported in our previous bulletin, Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK: February 2023.

Read the full report from ONS HERE