Earnings And Employment From Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK - April 2024

17th April 2024

Early estimates for March 2024 indicate that the number of payrolled employees rose by 0.7% compared with March 2023, a rise of 204,000 employees.

This annual increase was largest in the health and social work sector, with a rise of 172,000 employees.

Payrolled employment decreased by 67,000 employees (0.2%) in March 2024 when compared with February 2024; 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 February 2024 compared with January 2024 has been revised from an increase of 20,000 reported in the last bulletin to a decrease of 18,000; 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 March 2024 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 5.6% compared with March 2023.

Annual growth in median pay in March 2024 was highest in the accommodation and food service activities sector, with an increase of 8.4%, and lowest in the professional, scientific and technical sector, with an increase of 3.0%.

Payrolled employees
Early estimates for March 2024 indicate that there were 30.3 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a rise of 0.7% compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a rise of 204,000 people over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees decreased by 0.2 % in March 2024, a decrease of 67,000 people.

Note, this monthly change should be treated as provisional, because it is based on an early estimate of March 2024. More information on revisions can be found in Section 11: Strengths and limitations.

When comparing the number of payrolled employees in February 2024 with the previous month, the number decreased by 0.1%. This is revised down from the early estimate of a 0.1% increase reported in our previous bulletin, Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK: March 2024.

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% (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 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. However, since then, growth rates have continued to fall.

Read the full ONS report HERE