Northern Ireland jobs market 'continues post-pandemic recovery'

All regions of the UK saw payrolls increase over the year to February 2022

The Northern Ireland jobs market continued its post-pandemic recovery in February, official data suggests.

Payrolled employees, payroll earnings and number of employee jobs (as reported by businesses) were all above pre-pandemic levels.

However, the recovery is not complete, with the number of self-employed people still well below the pre-Covid level.

Unemployment and economic inactivity are also still higher than they were before the pandemic.

HMRC figures suggest 777,300 people were payrolled employees in February, a 0.5% increase from January and 5.4% higher than February 2021.

All regions of the UK saw payrolls increase over the year to February 2022, with London recording the largest increase (7.5%) and the East recording the smallest (4.8%).

Northern Ireland recorded a similar increase to the UK average of 5.5%.

A separate set of figures suggests the number of employee jobs reached a new high of 782,450 in December.

The figures come from the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), which surveys about 6,000 companies.

The survey covers all employers with 25 or more employees and all public sector employers.

The quarterly increase in employee jobs in December 2021 was largely driven by the services industry sector (+2,250 jobs).

The latest figures also show a slight uptick in proposed redundancies: 210 redundancies were proposed in February the highest monthly figure since July 2021.

This number is, however, still well below the average number of proposed redundancies in the second half of 2020 (at 1,050 per month).