Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK: January 2025

22nd January 2025

Early estimates for December 2024 indicate that the number of payrolled employees stayed largely the same compared with December 2023, falling slightly by 8,000 employees.

This annual change was highest in the health and social work sector, a rise of 109,000 employees, and lowest in the accommodation and food service activities sector, which decreased by 71,000 employees.

Payrolled employment decreased by 47,000 employees (0.2%) in December 2024 when compared with November 2024; figures for December should be treated as provisional estimates and are likely to be revised when more data are received next month.

UK payrolled employee growth for November 2024 compared with October 2024 has been revised from a decrease of 35,000 reported in the last bulletin to a decrease of 32,000; 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 December 2024 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 5.6% compared with December 2023.

Annual growth in median pay in December 2024 was highest in the accommodation and food service activities sector, with an increase of 10.0%, and lowest in the education sector, with an increase of 0.9%.

Payrolled employees
Early estimates for December 2024 indicate that there were 30.3 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), largely unchanged compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a fall of 8,000 employees over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees decreased by 0.2% in December 2024, a decrease of 47,000 people.

This monthly change should be treated as provisional, because it is based on an early estimate of December 2024. More information on revisions can be found in Section 9: Data sources and quality.

When comparing the number of payrolled employees in November 2024 with the previous month, the number decreased by 0.1%. This is no change from the early estimate of a 0.1% decrease reported in our previous bulletin, Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK: December 2024.

Read the full ONS report HERE