Earnings And Employment From Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, Uk - February 2024
13th February 2024
Early estimates for January 2024 indicate that the number of payrolled employees rose by 1.4% compared with January 2023, a rise of 413,000 employees.
This annual increase was largest in the health and social work sector, a rise of 217,000 employees.
Payrolled employment increased by 48,000 employees (0.2%) in January 2024 when compared with December 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 December 2023 compared with November 2023 has been revised from a decrease of 24,000 reported in the last bulletin to an increase of 31,000, because of the incorporation of additional real time information submissions into the statistics, which takes place every publication and reduces the need for imputation.
Early estimates for January 2024 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 6.4% compared with January 2023.
In this month's publication, estimates for pay in Northern Ireland for November and December 2023 have seen larger revisions than usual; this is because of additional imputation being run on schemes where we have identified partially missing data in those schemes' submissions.
Payrolled employees
Early estimates for January 2024 indicate that there were 30.4 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a rise of 1.4% compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a rise of 413,000 people over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees increased by 0.2% in January 2024, an increase of 48,000 people.
This monthly change should be treated as provisional, because it is based on an early estimate of January 2024 data.
Annual growth in the number of employees remained broadly within a range of 1.0% to 1.5% from mid-2016 until 2019. Growth rates before mid-2016 were higher than 1.5%.
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 remained high as the labour market continued to recover from the effects of the pandemic. From April 2022 the annual growth rate has been falling. Through 2022 this fall would have been partially caused by the comparison against the increase in employee numbers from March 2021, which levelled off as we no longer compared against this higher baseline. During 2023 growth rates continued to fall.
Median monthly pay
Early estimates for January 2024 indicate that median monthly pay was £2,334, an increase of 6.4% 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 tended to fluctuate around 3.6%, until 2020 when it became negative. This coincided with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and related economic and policy responses. From June 2020 median pay growth became positive again. Through 2022 the growth rate of median pay continued to increase in line with pre-coronavirus trends. Since the start of 2023 this trend has continued, but with more volatility caused by some months showing much higher growth rates.
Read the full ONS report HERE
