Labour Market Statistics December 2025

Date published: 16 December 2025

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 Pound 2,406 in November 2025, a decrease of Pound 13 (0.5%) over the month and an increase of Pound 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.

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 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%.

Seasonally adjusted claimant count rate remains relatively stable over the month

• 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.

Latest annual total of confirmed redundancies higher than previous year

• 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).

Quarterly Employment Survey (QES) headline measures

• 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.

Commentary

• The most recent labour market figures show that Northern Ireland's labour market is continuing to slow. Although there have been increases in employment levels in both the payrolled employee numbers from the HMRC payroll data and employee jobs from the QES over the year, both of these increases have been relatively small. Additionally, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) shows a decrease in the employment rate, with increases in both the unemployment rate and the economic inactivity rate.