Earnings And Employment From Pay As You Earn - August 2023

15th August 2023

Early estimates for July 2023 indicate that the number of payrolled employees rose by 1.9% (578,000 employees) compared with July 2022; the number of payrolled employees rose by 4.2% (1,211,000 employees) since February 2020.

Payrolled employment increased by 97,000 employees (0.3%) in July 2023 when compared with June 2023; 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 June 2023 compared with May 2023 has been revised from a decrease of 9,000 reported in the last bulletin to an increase of 47,000; this is 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 July 2023 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 7.8% compared with July 2022, and increased by 22.3% compared with February 2020.

Between July 2022 and July 2023, there was an increase of 15,000 payrolled employees aged under 25 years; during the same period, payrolled employees aged 35 to 49 years increased by 196,000.
For Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 regions, annual growth in payrolled employees in July 2023 was the highest in Luton with a rise of 4.5%, and lowest in Camden and City of London with a fall of 0.5%.

The increase in payrolled employees between July 2022 and July 2023 was largest in the health and social work sector with a rise of 214,000 employees, and smallest in the wholesale and retail sector with a fall of 10,000.

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 July 2023 was highest in the public administration sector with an increase of 14.0%, and lowest in the accommodation and food service activities sector with an increase of 5.6%; the growth in the public administration sector reflects the effects of the cost-of-living payment to civil servants, consisting of a one-off payment worth up to £1,500.

Payrolled employees
Early estimates for July 2023 indicate that there were 30.2 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a rise of 1.9% compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a rise of 578,000 people over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees increased by 0.3% in July 2023, which is equivalent to 97,000 people.

This monthly change of 97,000 should be treated as provisional, because it is based on an early estimate of July 2023 employees.

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