Labour Market Report August 2025

Date published: 12 August 2025

The latest labour market statistics were published today (12th August 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 July 2025 was 811,500, an increase of 0.1% over the month and an increase 0.7% over the year.
Earnings data from HMRC PAYE indicated that NI employees had a median monthly pay of £2,377 in July 2025, an increase of £32 (1.4%) over the month and an increase of £141 (6.3%) over the year.
The estimates from HMRC PAYE for the latest period are based on early 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 April-June 2025 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 2.4%. This represents an increase of 0.8 percentage points (pps) over the quarter and an increase of 0.6pps over the year. The quarterly change was statistically significant.
The proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work (the employment rate) was unchanged over the quarter and decreased by 1.3pps over the year to 71.6%.
The total number of weekly hours worked in NI was estimated at 29.9 million hours, a decrease of 0.3% on the previous quarter and a decrease of 0.1% 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) decreased by 0.7pps over the quarter and increased by 0.7pps over the year to 26.6%.

In July 2025, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 36,500 (3.7% of the workforce), a decrease of 3.1% from the previous month’s revised figure. The July 2025 claimant count is 22.2% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

NISRA, acting on behalf of the Department for the Economy, received confirmation that 340 redundancies occurred in July 2025. Over the year, August 2024 to July 2025, 2,370 redundancies were confirmed, which was approximately ninety percent of the figure for the previous year (2,640).
There were 150 proposed redundancies in July 2025, taking the annual total to 3,010, which was almost seven percent higher than the figure for the previous year (2,820).

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