Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information UK - February 2025

19th February 2025

Early estimates for January 2025 indicate that the number of payrolled employees broadly stayed the same compared with January 2024, a rise of just 49,000 employees.

This change was highest in the health and social work sector, a rise of 92,000 employees, and lowest in the accommodation and food service activities sector, a fall of 58,000 employees.

Payrolled employment slightly increased by 21,000 employees (0.1%) in January 2025 when compared with December 2024; figures for January should be treated as provisional estimates and are likely to be revised when more data are received next month.

UK payrolled employee growth for December 2024 compared with November 2024 has been revised from a decrease of 47,000 reported in the last bulletin to a decrease of 14,000; 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 January 2025 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 5.7% compared with January 2024.

Annual growth in median pay in January 2025 was highest in the accommodation and food service activities sector, with an increase of 10.4%, and lowest in the finance and insurance sector, with an increase of 2.9%.

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 with the increase in employee numbers from March 2021, which levelled off as we no longer compared against this higher baseline. However, growth rates then continued to slow through 2023.

Read the full ONS report HERE