- If pay growth carries on at its current pace, wages will be up 2.8% in a year.
- Before inflation, wages in September-November were up 6.6% in a year excluding bonuses and 6.5% with them.
- After inflation, wages rose 1.3% with bonuses and 1.4% without.
- Pay growth for the private sector was 6.5% (the highest since summer 2022). For the public sector it was 6.6% – down from 6.9% the previous month, and way down from 12.5% in June-August.
- The unemployment rate was 4.2%, largely unchanged on the quarter.
- The employment rate was 75.8%, up 0.1 percentage points on the quarter.
- The economic inactivity rate fell 0.1 percentage points on the quarter to 20.8%
- The estimated number of jobs (including self-employment) in December fell 24,000 to 30.2 million.
- Vacancies in October-December fell 49,000 in the quarter to 934,000 – the 18th consecutive fall – the longest ever recorded. They’re still above the pre-pandemic level.
The ONS has released employment and wage data for the year to September-November, using the new measurement methods: Labour market overview, UK – Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
Sarah Coles, head of personal finance, Hargreaves Lansdown:
“Wage rises have slowed again, so we’re making up ground far more slowly than we were earlier in the year, and there’s a growing divide.
Wage rises have been lumpy, and an awful lot of them were back in the summer, when some of the public sector got a significant wage rise. Since then, wage growth for the public sector has continued to fall. If pay growth carries on at its current pace, wages will be up 2.8% in a year.
The latest HL Savings & Resilience Barometer shows we’ll still end the year with less disposable income than we had before the pandemic. It also shows that the cost of living has risen 18.4% in the past two years.
However, your experiences of the cost-of-living crisis are wildly different depending on where you stand. There’s a big divide between different sectors, with wages in the wholesale, retail, hotels and restaurants sector up 7.2% and financial and business and manufacturing both up 7% – all comfortably ahead of inflation. Compare that to construction at 4.5%.
Meanwhile, inflation isn’t being felt equally. The Barometer shows that since the start of the cost-of-living crisis the cost of food and non-alcoholic drink is up almost 24%. The lower your income, the bigger the proportion of it you spend on essentials like food, so the harder this hits.
It’s one reason why the Barometer showed a growing gulf between the highest and the lowest earners, as those on lower incomes fall further and further behind – and are now building a growing debt problem.
And all this assumes you will keep your job. This month, there seems to be very little change in the employment picture. However, the Office for Budget Responsibility is pessimistic about the future, with unemployment hitting 4.7% at the end of next year, 5% the year after that and 5.1% by the last three months of 2026. This isn’t just higher than it previously expected, the rises are expected to go on for longer too.
