UK Job Market Report
25 March 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
After some of the steepest falls in vacancies since before the Covid-19 pandemic, the UK jobs market appears to be turning a corner. February saw 866,242 advertised job vacancies, falling just -0.1% compared to January 2024.
Driven by increasing monthly job openings in sectors such as Travel (+7.5%) and Maintenance (+6.6%), this marks the first indication of a steadying jobs market, after several recent months of sharp declines, including a -6.6% fall in vacancies between December 2023 and January 2024, and a -7.0% fall between November 2023 and December 2023.
Salaries
Average advertised salaries are now £38,478, up +0.8% monthly since January 2023. This +3.0% annual increase in salaries compared to the same time last year, underlines the challenge companies are having to find highly skilled talent to fill specialist, high-paying positions.
Meanwhile, salary transparency may also have turned a corner in the UK this month. Over 50% of roles advertised on Adzuna featured a salary in February (50.7%), compared to 49.3% without one. This is the highest level of salary transparency in the UK since May 2023.
Time to fill
Companies are still taking long to make decisions about new team members, perhaps in response to the reduction in hiring budgets. Advertised vacancies were live on average for 36.6 days before being filled in November 2023 (the latest data), the same as October 2023 and the longest time-to-fill since January 2023.
Competition
While prospective job hunters will be pleased to see one month of improving jobs data, vacancies are still down -15.1% compared to the same time last year. This is increasing the competition for available roles, with 1.86 jobseekers per vacancy, the highest this figure has been since August 2021.
Hottest cities
For another month running, Cambridge is the best city for job hunters with 0.3 jobseekers competing for available roles. Guildford came second with 0.5 jobseekers per available role, and Exeter followed closely with around 0.6 jobseekers for each role.
Bradford continues to be one of the hardest cities to find a job, with 7.3 job seekers per 2,643 vacancies. This is followed by Rochdale, with 4.8 jobseekers per role and Birmingham with 4.0 jobseekers for every advertised role.
UK regions
Advertised vacancies jumped back up month-on-month in some regions in February 2024, led by Yorkshire and the Humber (+1.5%), North West England (+1.2%), and East Midlands (+0.2%). In contrast, vacancies continued to fall in Scotland (-2.9%), Northern Ireland (-1.4%), London (-0.5%), South West England (-0.3%), West Midlands (-0.3%), and Wales (-0.04%).
In terms of salary, East Midlands remained the top region for the third month running, with average advertised salaries increasing by +6.5% compared to the same time last year, followed closely by Eastern England (+5.6%). London is continuing to rise up the table, following a +1.9% increase in advertised salaries, the second month in a row that London has experienced a positive salary increase.
UK sectors
The majority of sectors saw positive job increases month-on-month in February including Graduate (+5.3%) and Property (+5.2%), along with Travel and Maintenance. Whilst some sectors still experienced monthly falls in job postings including Retail (-9.5%), Domestic Help & Cleaning (-7%) and Hospitality & Catering (-5.0%).
The majority of job sectors have seen a decrease in postings on an annual basis but the decline appears to be slowing. Graduate roles have fallen -30.2% annually, whilst for PR, Advertising & Marketing it’s -13.7% and -10.1% for Engineering. This compares to January when some sectors such as Domestic Help & Cleaning experienced a -44.6% fall in advertised vacancies compared to the same time the year before. Teaching, which remains the largest sector by job postings (116,671), experienced an annual increase in roles by +12.6%.
Retail continued to be the sector with the highest advertised salary increase month on month, up +2.6% in February, with an average of £29,834. This may be a reaction to several retailers raising or pledging to raise wages to retain workers, including M&S, Sainsbury’s, Aldi and Lidl. Salaries for Maintenance jobs rose +2.1%, whilst for Social Work the increase was +1.5%. Jobseekers will also benefit from an increase in the national living wage which comes in on 1 April. Meanwhile, the IT industry saw its first positive salary increase month-on-month of +0.8% to £51,210 since September 2022, which demonstrates good news for the UK’s growing digital and tech sectors.
The sectors that experienced the biggest annual increases in advertised salaries were Energy, Oil & Gas (+16.4%), Travel (+13.5%) and Social Work (+12.6%), whilst IT was the only sector to experience a decrease in advertised salaries annually (-7.4%).
Energy, Oil & Gas jobs take the longest time to fill, at 45.7 days on average, followed by IT (45.0) and Creative & Design (42.0). Voluntary roles are filling fastest at just 30.4 days.
Trending jobs
The data also tracks the most popular occupations among UK jobseekers. Warehouse work continues to be the top trending job for the ninth month in a row.
Healthcare Support work remains in second position for the second month in a row. Meanwhile, Social Care work continues to be the third-most trending job.
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.