UK Job Market Report
19 May 2024
Adzuna has the most complete index of UK job vacancies covering all regions in the UK, based on every job vacancy advertised online in the UK from over 1,000 sources. This data is then normalised, de-duplicated, mix-adjusted and outliers are removed in real time to give an accurate, complete, up to the minute view of the job market. Our UK Job Market Report tracks advertised vacancies, average advertised salaries, competition for jobs, trending roles, time to fill positions, and more.
We also supply real-time data to the Number 10 Dashboard, the Cabinet Office and the Office for National Statistics’ labour market indices. For more granular data breakdowns at a local authority level, job title, or skill level, please contact our labour market intelligence division, Adzuna Intelligence.
Vacancies
Bright spots in the UK job market took the sting out of further falls in advertised vacancies throughout April. Monthly rises in vacancies in key sectors including Hospitality & Catering, Manufacturing and Teaching meant overall advertised vacancies fell -0.94% to 854,171 in April compared to March.
Salaries
Advertised average salaries continue to go in the other direction, with salaries rising +0.45% in April to £38,810. Average salaries, which are up +3.06% year-on-year are now at some of the highest levels on the Adzuna platform since 2016, demonstrating how tight the UK labour market has become.
Salary transparency has somewhat stabilised with only slightly more jobs posted without salaries (50.35%), compared to those with (49.65%). This metric hasn’t drastically changed throughout 2024, which is good to see.
Time to fill
Employers are taking even longer to fill roles – up to 39 days on average, compared to 35.6 in March – suggesting that the decline in vacancies is removing some of the negative consequences of a tight labour market.
Competition
While unemployment has increased to 4.3%, the highest figures since last May, jobseekers per vacancy has remained stable from last month at 1.89.
Hottest cities
For job hunters, the best cities to look for roles are Cambridge, Guildford and Exeter – the same three cities as last month. Cambridge has 7,394 vacancies and around 0.33 jobseekers for every role.
Bradford is consistently one of the hardest cities to find a job with the highest number of jobseekers per role, 7.82, and this is only getting harder. Bradford’s claimant figures continued to rise since March 2024, from 20,180 jobseekers to 20,935 competing for 2,676 jobs.
UK regions
Advertised vacancies jumped back up month-on-month in merely two regions in April 2024, led by South East England (+0.6%) and West Midlands (+0.3%).
In contrast, vacancies continued to fall in London (-2.4%), Northern Ireland (-1.9%), Scotland (-1.2%), East Midlands (-1.1%), South West England (-0.5%), and Yorkshire and the Humber (-0.3%).
East Midlands continues to top the regions for annual salary increases, up +6.68% to £36,188 compared to the same time last year. This has been driven in particular by increasing roles in the professional services, science and tech industries. The region’s biggest employees include Boots, Barchester Health, Cygnet Healthcare and AECOM. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland’s salaries have begun to recover, with annual salaries increasing +3.17% to £36,014.
London remains the region with the highest average salaries (£44,880), followed by Eastern England and South West England.
UK sectors
The majority of the sectors tracked on Adzuna experienced monthly falls in advertised vacancies though there was some positive growth. Hospitality & Catering (+4.75%), Manufacturing (+4.34%), Teaching (+3.85%), Logistics & Warehouse (+3%) and Charity & Voluntary (+2.59%), all experienced monthly increases in vacancies in April.
However, this was offset by declines in sectors including PR, Advertising & Marketing (-13.84%), and Domestic Help & Cleaning (-7.91%), Creative & Design (-7.46%) and Graduate (-5.4%). Travel jobs also experienced a small fall in April, -3.23%, after seeing a sharp increase in March 2024 when advertised vacancies increased by +16.27%, as companies hired new staff ahead of busy booking periods.
Year over year, Travel was the only sector to see advertised vacancies increase compared to the same time last year, +2.73%. Teaching experienced the smallest decrease (-0.35%), whilst sectors such as Domestic Help & Cleaning (-49.01%), Trade & Construction (-46.73%) and Admin (-41.88%) saw roles cut in half compared to April 2023.
Conversely, the fall in average vacancies has served to only boost advertised salaries as companies compete for skilled talent. Retail salaries increased +3.35% to £31,604, whilst Admin salaries rose +1.57% to £28,334 and Social Work was up +1.86% to £36,814. The largest annual salary gains compared to April 2023 were in the Energy, Oil & Gas sector (+19.67%), Social Work (+12.22%), and Manufacturing (+9.25%).
Two sectors saw salaries drop monthly, and two sectors experienced a decline annually. Legal (-0.33%) and Travel (-0.49%), saw minor falls in salary compared to March 2024, whilst IT salaries fell -5.65% annually alongside Graduate salaries (-0.4%), compared to April 2023.
Energy, Oil and Gas jobs take the longest time to fill, at 45.8 days on average, compared to Voluntary (29.1 days) and Legal (32.7 days).
Trending jobs
Warehouse work has been the highest-trending job for almost a year, having spent 11 months at the top of the list.
Healthcare Support work was the second most searched-for role in the past three months, whilst Social Care Worker has risen from fourth to third in April. Delivery driver is a new entrant in sixth place.
The data that Adzuna produce is an exceptionally rich and industry-leading source of real time insights into the labour market, local economies and what employers want. We’ve worked with the Adzuna team and their data across a range of projects, including labour market analysis, policy research and workforce planning and would highly recommend them.
Tony Wilson
Director
Institute for Employment Studies
Methodology
About Adzuna
Adzuna is a smarter, more transparent job search engine used by tens of millions of visitors per month. We love using the awesome power of technology to bring together every job in one place, help match people to better, more fulfilling jobs and keep Britain working.
Adzuna supplies real-time data to the Number 10 Dashboard, the Cabinet Office and Office for National Statistics labour market indices. In 2018, Adzuna won the contract to run Find a job, one of the British government’s most used online services.
Adzuna.co.uk was founded in 2011 by Andrew Hunter and Doug Monro, formerly of eBay, Gumtree, Qype and Zoopla and is backed by leading Venture Capital firms LocalGlobe, Index Ventures and Smedvig Capital.
We’ve spent a decade developing smarter, more transparent job search so jobseekers worldwide (we’re in 19 countries) can zero in on the right role faster.
About the Job Market Report
Adzuna has the most complete index of UK job vacancies covering all regions in the UK. The technology collects every job vacancy advertised online in the UK from over 1,000 sources. This data is then normalised, de-duplicated, mix-adjusted and outliers are removed in real time to give users an accurate, complete, up to the minute view of the job market.
Claimant count data is based on the latest Labour Market Statistics released by the ONS. The city areas referred to in this study are the top 50 cities in the UK, ranked by comparing the job vacancies in Adzuna’s comprehensive search index of over 1,000,000 live jobs to the number of claimants in each city from the latest ONS data. The full Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant count statistics are available for download here: www.nomisweb.co.uk.
The interest quotient for key roles is calculated by comparing how many views job postings for different occupations on Adzuna receive over a given month and comparing this to the overall job posting views over the same period. It provides a proxy for talent supply in the jobs market.
For more granular data breakdowns at a local authority level, job title, or skill level, please contact our labour market intelligence division, Adzuna Intelligence.