Labour Market Report February 2025

The latest labour market statistics were published today (18th February 2025) by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency.

Payrolled employees and median earnings increased over the month

The number of employees receiving pay through HMRC PAYE in NI in January 2025 was 806,700, an increase of 0.2% over the month and an increase 1.0% over the year.
Earnings data from HMRC PAYE indicated that NI employees had a median monthly pay of £2,290 in January 2025, an increase of £2 (0.1%) over the month and an increase of £149 (7.0%) 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 October-December 2024 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 1.6%. This represents a decrease of 0.1 percentage points (pps) over the quarter and a decrease of 0.7pps over the year.
The proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work (the employment rate) increased by 0.1pps over the quarter and decreased by 0.8pps over the year to 72.1%.
The total number of weekly hours worked in NI was estimated at 29.6 million hours, an increase of 3.3% on the previous quarter and an increase of 3.1% on the equivalent period last year. This represented a statistically significant annual increase.
The economic inactivity rate (the proportion of people aged 16 to 64 who were not working and not seeking or available to work) was unchanged over the quarter and increased by 1.3pps over the year to 26.6%.

In January 2025, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 40,000 (4.1% of the workforce), an increase of 1.1% from the previous month’s revised figure. The January 2025 claimant count remains 34% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

NISRA, acting on behalf of the Department for the Economy, received confirmation that 50 redundancies occurred in January 2025. Over the year February 2024 to January 2025, 1,850 redundancies were confirmed, which was approximately four-fifths of the of the figure for the previous year (2,380).
There were 440 proposed redundancies in January 2025, taking the annual total to 3,270, which was around four-fifths of the figure for the previous year (4,000).

The statistical bulletin and associated tables are available on the Labour Market Report - February 2025 page.

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