Labour Market Report December 2024

The latest labour market statistics were published today (17th December 2024) by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency.

Payrolled employees unchanged over the month and median earnings increased

The number of employees receiving pay through HMRC PAYE in NI in November 2024 was 806,200, unchanged over the month and an increase 1.1% over the year.
Earnings data from HMRC PAYE indicated that NI employees had a median monthly pay of £2,288 in November 2024, an increase of £11 (0.5%) over the month and an increase of £158 (7.4%) over the year.
The estimates from HMRC PAYE for the latest period, are based on provisional data and, therefore, are more likely to be subject to larger revisions.

The latest NI seasonally adjusted unemployment rate (the proportion of economically active people aged 16 and over who were unemployed) for the period August-October 2024 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 1.6%. This represents a decrease of 0.3 percentage points (pps) over the quarter and a decrease of 0.4pps over the year.
The proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work (the employment rate) decreased by 0.4pps over the quarter and decreased by 0.5pps over the year to 72.3%.
The total number of weekly hours worked in NI was estimated at 29.7 million hours, an increase of 1.3% on the previous quarter and an increase of 2.2% on the equivalent period last year.
The economic inactivity rate (the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 who were not working and not seeking or available to work) increased by 0.6pps over the quarter and increased by 0.7pps over the year to 26.6%.

In November 2024, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 41,300 (4.2% of the workforce), a decrease of 0.5% from the previous month’s revised figure. The November 2024 claimant count remains 38.3% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

NISRA, acting on behalf of the Department for the Economy, received confirmation that 90 redundancies occurred in November 2024. Over the year December 2023 to November 2024, 1,690 redundancies were confirmed, which was approximately two-thirds of the figure for the previous year (2,590).
There were 290 proposed redundancies in November 2024, taking the annual total to 2,960, around seventy percent of the figure for the previous year (4,310).

Businesses reported that employee jobs increased over the quarter (0.9%) and increased over the year (1.1%) to 831,780 jobs in September 2024.

The statistical bulletin and associated tables are available on the Labour Market Report - December 2024 page.

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