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

10th June 2025

Early estimates for May 2025 indicate that the number of payrolled employees was 30.2 million, a fall of 0.9% from May 2024; this is equivalent to 274,000 fewer employees.

The earlier timing of the data extract for May 2025 means that these estimates are more uncertain than usual; additional caution is needed in interpreting these earlier estimates.

The largest increase was in the health and social work sector, a rise of 62,000 employees; the largest decrease was in the accommodation and food service activities sector, a fall of 124,000 employees.

Payrolled employment decreased by 109,000 employees (0.4%) in May 2025 when compared with April 2025; figures for May should be treated as provisional estimates, and are likely to be revised when more data are received next month.

UK payrolled employee growth for April 2025 compared with March 2025 has been revised from a decrease of 33,000 reported in the last bulletin to a decrease of 55,000; 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 May 2025 indicate that median monthly pay increased by 5.8% compared with May 2024.

Annual growth in median pay in May 2025 was highest in the accommodation and food service activities sector, with an increase of 7.5%, and lowest in the finance and insurance sector, with an increase of 3.5%.

Payrolled employees
Early estimates for May 2025 indicate that there were 30.2 million payrolled employees (Figure 1), a change of 0.9% compared with the same period of the previous year. This is a decline of 274,000 employees over the 12-month period. Compared with the previous month, the number of payrolled employees decreased by 0.4 % in May 2025, a decrease of 109,000 people.

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 rebounded 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 decrease throughout 2023 and 2024.

Read the full ONS report HERE