Employment by industry and sex, UK, published quarterly, non-seasonally adjusted. Labour Force Survey. These are official statistics in development.

In April 2025, the employment rate in the United Kingdom was 75.1 percent, up from 75 percent in the previous month. After almost dropping below 70 percent in 2011, the employment rate in the United Kingdom started to climb at a relatively fast pace, peaking in early 2020. Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the employment declined to 74.6 percent by January 2021. Although not quite at pre-pandemic levels, the employment rate has since recovered. Labor market trouble in 2025? Although unemployment in the UK spiked at 5.3 percent in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it fell throughout most of 2022, to just 3.6 percent in August 2022. Around that time, the number of job vacancies in the UK was also at quite high levels, reaching a peak of 1.3 million by May 2022. The strong labor market put employees in quite a strong position, perhaps encouraging the high number of resignations that took place around that time. Since 2023, however, the previously hot labor market has cooled, with unemployment reaching 4.6 percent in April 2025, and job vacancies falling to a four-year-low of 736,000 in May 2025. Furthermore, the number of employees on UK payrolls has fallen by 227,500 in the first five months of the year, indicating that 2025 will be a tough one for the labor market. Headline economic measures revised in early 2025 Along with the unemployment rate, the UK's inflation rate is also expected to be higher than initially thought in 2025, reaching a rate of 3.2 percent for the year. The economy will also grow at a slower pace of one percent, rather than the initial prediction of two percent. Though these negative trends are not expected to continue in the long term, the current government has already expended significant political capital on unpopular decisions, such as the cutting of Winter Fuel Payments to pensioners in 2024. As of June 2025, they are almost as unpopular as the previous government, with a net approval rating of -52 percent.

39.8% of workers from the Indian ethnic group were in 'professional' jobs in 2021 – the highest percentage out of all ethnic groups in this role.

Workforce jobs by industry, UK countries and English regions, published quarterly, seasonally adjusted.

The employment rate in London was 75.6 percent in the twelve months to December 2024, which was higher than in England's metropolitan counties, that cover six major urban areas in the country. Of these counties, the West Midlands had the lowest employment rate of 69.5 percent.

For further detailed information about methodology, users should consult the Labour Force Survey User Guide, included with the APS documentation. For variable and value labelling and coding frames that are not included either in the data or in the current APS documentation, users are advised to consult the latest versions of the LFS User Guides, which are available from the ONS Labour Force Survey - User Guidance webpages.

Occupation data for 2021 and 2022
The ONS has identified an issue with the collection of some occupational data in 2021 and 2022 data files in a number of their surveys. While they estimate any impacts will be small overall, this will affect the accuracy of the breakdowns of some detailed (four-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)) occupations, and data derived from them. None of ONS' headline statistics, other than those directly sourced from occupational data, are affected and you can continue to rely on their accuracy. The affected datasets have now been updated. Further information can be found in the ONS article published on 11 July 2023: Revision of miscoded occupational data in the ONS Labour Force Survey, UK: January 2021 to September 2022

APS Well-Being Datasets
From 2012-2015, the ONS published separate APS datasets aimed at providing initial estimates of subjective well-being, based on the Integrated Household Survey. In 2015 these were discontinued. A separate set of well-being variables and a corresponding weighting variable have been added to the April-March APS person datasets from A11M12 onwards. Further information on the transition can be found in the Personal well-being in the UK: 2015 to 2016 article on the ONS website.

APS disability variables
Over time, there have been some updates to disability variables in the APS. An article explaining the quality assurance investigations on these variables that have been conducted so far is available on the ONS Methodology webpage.

• age: single year of age, year and month of birth, age completed full-time education and age obtained highest qualification, age of oldest dependent child and age of youngest dependent child
• family unit and household: including a number of variables concerning the number of dependent children in the family according to their ages, relationship to head of household and relationship to head of family
• nationality and country of origin
• geography: including county, unitary/local authority, place of work, Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics 2 (NUTS2) and NUTS3 regions, and whether lives and works in same local authority district
• health: including main health problem, and current and past health problems
• education and apprenticeship: including numbers and subjects of various qualifications and variables concerning apprenticeships
• industry: including industry, industry class and industry group for main, second and last job, and industry made redundant from
• occupation: including 4-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) for main, second and last job and job made redundant from
• system variables: including week number when interview took place and number of households at address

The Secure Access data have more restrictive access conditions than those made available under the standard EUL. Prospective users will need to gain ONS Accredited Researcher status, complete an extra application form and demonstrate to the data owners exactly why they need access to the additional variables. Users are strongly advised to first obtain the standard EUL version of the data to see if they are sufficient for their research requirements.

There were approximately 4.8 million people employed in London as of the first quarter of 2025, compared with 3.4 million in the first quarter of 2000.

Number of persons in the labour force (employment and unemployment), unemployment rate, participation rate and employment rate by census metropolitan area. Data are presented for 12 months earlier, previous month and current month, as well as year-over-year and month-to-month level change and percentage change. Data are also available for the standard error of the estimate, the standard error of the month-to-month change and the standard error of the year-over-year change.

As of April 2025, there were around 4.4 million self-employed workers in the United Kingdom. During this provided time-period, self-employment in the UK has grown steadily, from a low of just 3.2 million in December 2000, to a peak of over five million at the start of 2020. After the COVID-19 pandemic, however, self-employment has fallen to levels not seen since the middle of 2015 and has struggled to recover to its pre-pandemic peak. Demographics of the self-employed There has consistently been more men self-employed than women in the UK, with recent figures showing that over 2.8 million men, and over 1.5 million women were self-employed. As of 2024, the most likely age group to be self-employed were those aged 65 or over, with over a third of workers in this age group self-employed. In the same year, around 16.5 percent of workers in London were self-employed, compared with the UK average of 13.1 percent, making London the region with the highest rate of self-employment in the UK. Self-employment support scheme In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government unveiled various measures to mitigate the economic costs to businesses and individuals. For self-employed workers, this manifested itself as the Self-Employment Income-Support Scheme, which was in its third iteration, or tranche, by December 2020. During the first tranche, which ran from March to July, there were 2.7 million claims made in total, with claims to the second and third tranches numbering 2.4 million and 1.7 million respectively. As of December 13, 2020, the overall value of these claims amounted to 14.5 billion British pounds.

London had the highest unemployment rate among regions of the United Kingdom in the first quarter of 2025 at ****percent, while for the UK as a whole, the unemployment rate was ****percent. Three other regions also had an unemployment rate higher than the national average, while Northern Ireland had the lowest unemployment rate in this time period, at ****percent. Labor market recovery after COVID-19 After reaching historically low levels of unemployment in 2019, there was a noticeable spike in the UK unemployment rate in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. After peaking at ****percent in late 2020, the unemployment rate declined throughout 2021 and 2022. High levels of job vacancies, resignations, and staff shortages in 2022, were all indicative of a very tight labor market that year, but all these measures have started to point in the direction of a slightly looser labor market. UK's regional economic divide While the North of England has some of the country’s largest cities, the sheer size and economic power of London is much larger than the UK's other urban agglomerations. Partly, due to the size of London, the United Kingdom is one of Europe’s most centralized counties, and there is a clear divide between the economic prospects of north and south England. In 2022, for example, the gross domestic product per head in London was ****** British pounds, far higher than the UK average of *******pounds, and significantly larger than North East England, the region with the lowest GDP per head at *******pounds.

In the three months to May 2025, there were approximately 736,000 job vacancies in the UK, the fewest number of job vacancies since April 2021. The number of job vacancies in the United Kingdom reached a record high of 1.3 million in the three months to May 2022, with the number of vacancies steadily falling since then. During the provided time period, the number of job vacancies fell to its lowest levels in the months leading to June 2020, at just 328,000, at the height of COVID-19 restrictions. Tight labor market beginning to loosen After weathering the economic storm of COVID-19, the UK labor market has been reasonably healthy since 2021. The unemployment rate, which reached 5.1 percent in late 2020, declined in the following months, to a post-pandemic low of 3.5 percent by August 2022. Since that point, however, the unemployment rate has crept up, and was 4.4 percent in November 2024. Resignations have also started to decline, after reaching a peak of 442,000 in the second quarter of 2022, there were just 181,000 in the third quarter of 2024. Which industries are experiencing staff shortages? The percentage of businesses reporting a staff shortage in the UK reached 15.7 percent in September 2022, before falling to just 9.7 percent by October 2023, another indication of a loosening labor market. According to data from that month, approximately 1 in 4 UK businesses in the accommodation and food services had a shortage of staff, the highest of any sector, followed by human health and social work at 18.4 percent, and manufacturing at 17.6 percent. Many of the recent struggles of Britain's National Health Service are directly related to staff shortages, with the public seeing a shortage of doctors and nurses, and overworked staff as some of the main problems facing the NHS.

This is the latest compendium publication in the NHS Vacancy Statistics series containing vacancy related data for the NHS which provide different views on recruitment information for the NHS. Data from the Electronic Staff Record (ESR) and Trac Recruitment Management Software (Trac) provide a range of proxy data sources for NHS vacancies. The series also includes management information related to vacancies within the NHS which have been collected by NHS England (NHSE). Due to the complex nature of how NHS vacancy data is defined and collected, all data sources should be treated with a degree of caution. Users should note these data do not indicate how much of the reported substantive gap is filled by temporary staff. NHS England is currently developing guidance for NHS Trusts regarding the recording of Establishment numbers (planned and funded workforce levels), which are used in the calculation of vacancy rates. This is to ensure that these figures are recorded consistently by Trusts and provide a more accurate figure of establishment and therefore vacancy rates. This work may also consider the collection and presentation of data on the temporary staff who are employed by Trusts, to enhance existing vacancy data and information. Following the transition to NHS Jobs new service in 2022, which resulted in a temporary pause in the data that was previously part of this publication, we plan to reintroduce data from NHS Jobs to the next release of this publication in August 2024. Data will follow the same format and presentation and will be backdated to when data was last updated in September 2022. To help with the development of this publication, feedback can be sent to: enquiries@nhsdigital.nhs.uk with the subject heading ‘NHS Vacancy Statistics publication feedback’.

According to the 2021 Census, 62.9% (37.5 million) of the overall population of England and Wales was of ‘working age’ (between 16 and 64 years old).

As of the first quarter of 2025, the youth unemployment rate in the UK was highest in London at 18.6 percent, compared with the UK average of 14.2 percent. As of this quarter, Northern Ireland had the lowest youth unemployment rate at just 5.1 percent.

As of the first quarter of 2025, there were approximately ****million people employed in the finance and insurance sector in the UK, compared with ****million in the first quarter of 2000.

As of the first quarter of 2025, there were estimated to be ******* job vacancies in the human health and social work activities industry sector in the United Kingdom, the most of any industry. The sector with the fewest number of job vacancies in this month was mining and quarrying, with only **** thousand estimated vacancies.

Shell, former Royal Dutch Shell, employed approximately 96,000 people worldwide in 2024. Shell is one of the top six publicly traded oil and gas companies (also known as ‘Big Oil) worldwide, operating in every segment of the oil and gas industry. It is also one of the largest companies worldwide by revenue. The company is headquartered in London, United Kingdom and was established through a merger of United Kingdom-based Shell Transport and Trading Company and the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company of the Netherlands. Shell - the global employer Shell employs people all around the world. In 2024, the majority of its workforce was located in Asia, at 36,000. Following Asia was Europe, with 30,000 employees, then North America with 23,000 employees. Africa had 3,000 employees. South America had the least number of employees, at 2,000. Oil and gas sector employment Russian majority state-owned gas giant Gazprom is the biggest oil and gas employer worldwide. In 2023, it employed around 492,000 people. Gazprom was followed by PetroChina, which is the publicly traded daughter of state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.

In 2024, EY had a total global workforce of almost 400,000 people. The majority of employees worked in the EMEIA region with a total of roughly 157,000. EY - Global powerhouse Headquartered in London, EY, one of the Big Four accounting firms, operate in over 150 countries worldwide. The firm generated a total revenue of approximately 51 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, a significant growth compared to the previous year. The region with the highest revenue in 2024 was the Americas. The Big Four The Big Four consist of Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG. These firms are the biggest auditing and accounting firms in the world that offer various professional services such as assurance, corporate finance, and legal services. They have a significant influence on the auditing sector worldwide. The combined revenue of the Big Four was approximately 204 billion U.S. dollars in 2023. Deloitte has consistently generated the highest amount of revenue, with KPMG bringing in the least out of the four. When broken down by function, advisory and consulting generated the highest revenue across the Big Four in 2023.

In 2023, the roles which had the highest representation of female employees for Allen & Overy in the United Kingdom were in their professional staff. The role with the highest representation of male employees are partners, with men occupying 72 percent of these positions.