Labour Market Statistics - October 2025

Date published: 14 October 2025

Payrolled employees and median earnings increased over the year

• The number of employees receiving pay through HMRC PAYE in NI in September 2025 was 814,700, 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 Pound 2,401 in September 2025, an increase of Pound 32 (1.4%) over the month and an increase of Pound 154 (6.9%) 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.

Labour Force Survey headline measures

• The latest NI seasonally adjusted unemployment rate (the proportion of economically active people aged 16 and over who were unemployed) for the period June-August 2025 was estimated from the Labour Force Survey at 2.6%. This represents an increase of 0.5 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 0.9pps over the quarter and decreased by 1.1pps over the year to 71.2%.
• The total number of weekly hours worked in NI was estimated at 28.7 million hours, a decrease of 5.1% on the previous quarter and a decrease of 0.4% 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 0.5pps over the quarter and increased by 0.4pps over the year to 26.9%.

Seasonally adjusted claimant count rate remains relatively stable over the month

• In September 2025, the seasonally adjusted number of people on the claimant count was 36,900 (3.8% of the workforce), an increase of 2.9% from the previous month's revised figure. The September 2025 claimant count remains 23.7% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

Latest annual total of confirmed redundancies similar to previous year

• NISRA, acting on behalf of the Department for the Economy, received confirmation that 100 redundancies occurred in September 2025. Over the year, October 2024 to September 2025, 2,350 redundancies were confirmed, which was similar to the figure for the previous year (2,310).
• There were 240 proposed redundancies in September 2025, taking the annual total to 2,910, which was just below the figure for the previous year (3,000).

Commentary

• The latest Labour Market results continue to highlight a slowing down of the labour market within Northern Ireland. Across all sources, changes in the employment levels over the year have been relatively small.  Although there was an increase in payrolled employee numbers from the HMRC payroll data, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows a decrease in the employment rate, with increases in both the unemployment rate and the economic inactivity rate.