Labour Market Report June 2025

Date published: 10 June 2025

The latest labour market statistics were published today (10th June 2025) by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency.

Payrolled employees and median earnings decreased over the month

The number of employees receiving pay through HMRC PAYE in NI in May 2025 was 809,700, a decrease of 0.1% over the month and an increase 0.8% over the year.
Earnings data from HMRC PAYE indicated that NI employees had a median monthly pay of £2,385 in May 2025, a decrease of £21 (0.9%) over the month and an increase of £152 (6.8%) over the year. Median earnings in the latest three months may have been affected by local pay awards.
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 February-April 2025 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 1.8%. This represents an increase of 0.2 percentage points (pps) over the quarter and a decrease of 0.3pps over the year.
The proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work (the employment rate) decreased by 0.5pps over the quarter and decreased by 1.0pps over the year to 71.7%.
The total number of weekly hours worked in NI was estimated at 30.4 million hours, an increase of 4.1% on the previous quarter and an increase of 4.3% 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 0.3pps over the quarter and increased by 1.2pps over the year to 26.9%.

In May 2025, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 38,200 (3.9% of the workforce), a decrease of 1.5% from the previous month’s revised figure. The May 2025 claimant count remains 28% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

NISRA, acting on behalf of the Department for the Economy, received confirmation that 560 redundancies occurred in May 2025. Over the year June 2024 to May 2025, 2,170 redundancies were confirmed, which was approximately ninety percent of the figure for the previous year (2,470).
There were 780 proposed redundancies in May 2025, taking the annual total to 3,200, which was around eighty percent of the figure for the previous year (4,040).

Businesses reported that employee jobs increased over the quarter (1.0%) and increased over the year (2.1%) to 840,750 jobs in March 2025.

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