NI employment down over quarter and year to 70.7%

Date published: 16 December 2025

Topics: Labour Market Overview

The latest labour market statistics were published today (16th December 2025) by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency.

Payrolled employees and median earnings increased over the year

The number of employees receiving pay through HMRC PAYE in NI in November 2025 was 816,600, an increase of 0.1% over the month and an increase 1.2% over the year.
Earnings data from HMRC PAYE indicated that NI employees had a median monthly pay of £2,406 in November 2025, a decrease of £13 (0.5%) over the month and an increase of £108 (4.7%) 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 August-October 2025 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 2.4%. This represents an increase of 0.1 percentage points (pps) over the quarter and an increase of 0.8pps over the year.
The proportion of people aged 16 to 64 in work (the employment rate) decreased by 1.1pps over the quarter and decreased by 1.6pps over the year to 70.7%.
The total number of weekly hours worked in NI was estimated at 29.2 million hours, a decrease of 0.5% on the previous quarter and a decrease of 1.8% 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 1.0pps over the quarter and increased by 0.9pps over the year to 27.5%.

In November 2025, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 36,800 (3.8% of the workforce), an increase of 2.6% from the previous month’s revised figure. The November 2025 claimant count remains 23.3% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

NISRA, acting on behalf of the Department for the Economy, received confirmation that 70 redundancies occurred in November 2025. Over the year, December 2024 to November 2025, 2,290 redundancies were confirmed, which was over thirty-five percent higher than the figure for the previous year (1,690).
There were 230 proposed redundancies in November 2025, taking the annual total to 2,700, which was almost nine percent less than the figure for the previous year (2,960).

Businesses reported that employee jobs decreased over the quarter (0.3%) and increased over the year (1.0%) to 838,200 jobs in September 2025.

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