The unemployment rate in the UK dropped to 3.7% for the first three months of 2022, the lowest since 1974, as the number of vacancies in the UK outpaced the number of unemployed people. Employers paid big bonuses in 2022 to retain staff or attract more employees. During the January–March 2022 period, job-to-job moves increased to a record-high owing to resignations rather than dismissals. There has also been increased movement of people in the 16–64 year age group from economic inactivity* to employment.
How Many Active Jobs Are in the UK?
According to GlobalData’s Job Analytics, the UK had 185,081 active jobs in April 2022, whereas March 2022 reported the highest number of active jobs in the past year with 186,335 job vacancy postings. For the period April 2021–April 2022, the UK registered an 80% increase in the number of active jobs. However, the rate of month-over-month growth in vacancies slowed down in April 2022.
Wage Growth in the UK
The growth in employees’ average total wages (including bonuses) was 7.0% for the period January–March 2022. However, the growth in average regular pay (excluding bonus) was only 4.2%, which failed to beat the rising inflation in the UK, pegged at 9% (12-month rate) in April 2022.
The wage growth widens in the public and private sector jobs, as the average weekly earnings, including bonus (in nominal terms), was 8.2% for the private sector but a meager 1.6% for the public sector. In the private sector, employees in the financial services, business services, wholesaling, retail, hotels, restaurants, construction, and the service industry reported a strong growth owing to huge bonus payments, while for workers in the manufacturing industry, the growth in average weekly earnings remained weak.
The weekly hours worked in the first quarter of 2022 reached 1.042 billion, up 14.8 million over that in the previous three months. However, this was still 10.7 million hours lower than that in the pre-COVID level.
While employment opportunities increased in the UK labor market, the economic stagnation and increasing inflation will put a wage squeeze on the lower-income segment.
*Economic inactivity: The number of economically inactive people in the UK is measured by the Labour Force Survey (LFS) and consists of people aged 16 and above without a job who have not sought work in the last four weeks and/or are not available to start work in the next two weeks.
Don’t wait - discover a universe of connected data & insights with your next search. Browse over 28M data points across 22 industries.
Access more premium companies when you subscribe to Explorer
Contact the team or request a demo to find out how our data can drive your business forward