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

12th September 2023

Early estimates for August 2023 indicate that the number of payrolled employees rose by 1.5% compared with August 2022, a rise of 449,000 employees; the number of payrolled employees was up by 3.9% since February 2020, a rise of 1,120,000.

Payrolled employment decreased by 1,000 employees (0.0%) in August 2023 when compared with July 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 July 2023 compared with June 2023 has been revised from an increase of 97,000 reported in the last bulletin to a decrease of 4,000; 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 August 2023 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 6.7% compared with August 2022, and increased by 21.4% when compared with February 2020.

Between August 2022 and August 2023, there was a decrease of 41,000 payrolled employees aged under 25 years; during the same period, payrolled employees aged 35 to 49 years increased by 174,000.

For Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) 3 regions, annual growth in payrolled employees in August 2023 was the highest in Coventry with a rise of 3.9%, and was lowest in Camden and City of London with a fall of 1.4%; at local administrative unit level, growth rates varied between negative 6.8% and positive 4.7%.

The increase in payrolled employees between August 2022 and August 2023 was largest in the health and social work sector with a rise of 193,000 employees, and smallest in the Wholesale and retail; repair of motor vehicles sector with a fall of 19,000.

Annual growth in median pay for employees in August 2023 was highest in the other service activities sector with an increase of 8.7%, and lowest in the finance and insurance sector with an an increase of 3.2%.

Payrolled employees
Early estimates for August 2023 indicate that there were 30.1 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a rise of 1.5% compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a rise of 449,000 people over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees showed was largely unchanged at 0.0% in August 2023, which is equivalent to a decrease of 1,000 people.

This monthly change of 1,000 should be treated as provisional, because it is based on an early estimate of August 2023 employees. More information on revisions can be found in Section 11: Strengths and limitations.

When comparing the number of payrolled employees in July 2023 with the previous month, the number showed was largely unchanged at 0.0%. This is revised down from the early estimate of a 0.3% increase reported in our previous Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK: August 2023 bulletin.

Read the full report HERE