Employment rate in Northern Ireland reaches record high

Northern Ireland's unemployment rate has fallen to a new record low

The employment rate in Northern Ireland reached a record high of 72.8% between August and October, official figures suggest.

The employment rate is a measurement of the percentage of working age adults who are in a job.

The rate was 0.5 percentage points above the pre-pandemic level of 72.3% recorded from November 2019 to January 2020.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell to a new record low of just 2.1%.

The August-October period was the first time the unemployment, employment and economic inactivity rates have all been better than the pre-pandemic levels recorded in November-January 2020.

However, the most up-to-date jobs market indicator, payroll data for November, suggested the jobs market may have peaked.

The HMRC figures suggests the number of workers on company payrolls declined marginally in November from 796,904 to 796,415.

Monthly pay up

The HMRC data also suggested the sharp rise in cash wages seen in Northern Ireland over the last two years, related to inflation, had levelled off.

Typical monthly pay in Northern Ireland was £2,064 in November, an increase of 2.3% over the year and a month-on-month fall of 1.8%.

By contrast, typical wages in the UK as a whole showed a 1.2% month-on-month increase in November.

That meant Northern Ireland earnings were 11% below UK earnings, the largest difference on record.

Jason Calvert, a director at PwC Northern Ireland, said low pay was an ongoing problem in Northern Ireland.

"Wages are continuing to run behind the rate of inflation in the UK," he said.

"There are cost-of-living differences here, but this is getting worse, not better.

"There's a whole range of things that are probably linked to that, interest rate hikes, redundancies that we're seeing huge amounts of in Northern Ireland."

'We need to prepare for the worst'

The Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (Nisra) also found redundancies in Northern Ireland had tripled.

The statistics highlighted there were 410 redundancies in November 2023 and, between December 2022 and November 2023, 2,590 redundancies were confirmed.

That is over three times more than in the previous year, when confirmed redundancies stood at 850.

Mr Calvert added: "I think we do need to be prepared for the worst. We have seen some of the big significant steady wage increases over the last two years in cash terms. But then you link that with the interest rates, it's making it harder for businesses to service loans.

"Some sectors in particular - if you look at finance and business - have seen higher wage growth than other sectors.

"I think when you put that in the context of the confidence in the Northern Irish market I do think we need to be braced for that to potentially continue into the next year."

• NI unemployment rate reaches record low

• Employment rate returns to pre-pandemic peak

• Are redundancies a sign of NI job market downturn?

A different measurement, the Quarterly Employment Survey (QES), showed the services sector remained the engine of job creation.

The QES surveys about 6,000 companies, covering all employers with 25 or more employees and all public sector employers.

The latest survey, covering the third quarter of this year, showed the number of employee jobs increased by 19,340 (2.4%) over the year with 17,550 coming from the services sector.