Scotland's Labour Market Insights: April 2025

Data and Methodology

Further to the Labour Market Trends publication that was released on 15 April 2025, this publication provides more detailed trends and analysis for topics of interest from a wider range of labour market data sources for Scotland.

Figure 18: Measures and data sources presented in this publication

Infographic showing measures and data sources included in this publication for people in work, people not in work and people moving into work.

Note that the majority of participants receiving employment support were unemployed or inactive before joining No One Left Behind, however a small proportion were employed when starting.

The statistics in this release are Official Statistics or Official Statistics in Development. Information on the data sources is given in the Data sources section.

Where can labour market data for Scotland be accessed

The data contained in this release can be obtained from the following sources:

Table 2: Table of data sources and where the data can be accessed

Data Source	Where data can be accessed	Frequency
ONS Regional Labour Market publication	Labour market in the regions of the UK Statistical bulletins - Office for National Statistics	Monthly
ONS Annual Population Survey	Regional labour market: headline indicators for Scotland - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)	Quarterly
HMRC Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) – Payrolled employees and median pay	Earnings and employment from Pay As You Earn Real Time Information, UK Statistical bulletins - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)	Monthly
HMRC Pay As You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) –Payrolled employments by nationality, region and industry	UK payrolled employments by nationality, region, industry, age and sex, from July 2014 to December 2024 - GOV.UK	Annual

Further labour market information for Scotland from the ONS Annual Population Survey is also published on Nomis

Data sources

ONS have published a Comparison of labour market data sources methodology document which compares data sources and discusses some of the main differences.

ONS Labour Force Survey

The Labour Force Survey is a survey of UK households collected and published by the Office for Nationals Statistics. Information are obtained from a sample survey and are therefore subject to some error. LFS estimates are currently classed as official statistics in development until further review.

ONS Annual Population Survey

The APS combines results from the ONS Labour Force Survey (LFS) with the local LFS boosts. This provides a larger annual sample of households. Compared with the quarterly LFS, the annual data is more robust.

The population totals used for the latest APS estimates use projected growth rates from Real Time Information data for UK, EU and non-EU populations based on 2021 patterns. The total population used for the APS therefore does not take into account any changes in migration, birth rates, death rates, and so on, since June 2021, so level estimates may be under- or over-estimating the true values and should be used with caution. Estimates of rates will, however, be robust.

ONS Annual Population Survey (APS) estimates have not been reweighted to the new population estimates used for the LFS. Consequently, all APS estimates remain weighted to the previous population totals, which will be inconsistent with those used for ONS Labour Force Survey (LFS) in the latest periods.

ONS have recently conducted analysis to assess the impact of falling sample sizes over recent years on the quality of APS estimates. ONS state that although the APS estimates are robust at National and headline regional level, there are concerns with the quality of estimates for smaller groups of the population, for example local authority level estimates.

This assessment of the APS estimates alongside the fact that APS estimates have not been reweighted to new population estimates has led ONS, in agreement with the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR), to temporarily suspend the accreditation of all APS-based outputs. Further details on this can be found in the exchange between ONS and OSR:

Michael Keoghan to Siobhan Tuohy-Smith: Request to suspend APS accreditation – Office for Statistics Regulation (statisticsauthority.gov.uk)

Therefore, APS estimates are currently classed as official statistics in development until further review.

The longer-term solution remains the replacement of the Labour Force Survey with the Transformed Labour Force Survey (TLFS).

Labour Market Transformation

ONS are transforming the LFS. They are publishing Labour market transformation articles providing updates on the transformation of labour market statistics.

Scottish Government are stakeholders in the transformation of the labour force survey. To provide any feedback on labour market statistics for Scotland, please feedback to LMStats@gov.scot

Other sources

This publication also contains HMRC PAYE Real Time Information (RTI) on median monthly earnings and payrolled employees. These are classed as Official Statistics in Development.

HMRC RTI

This release covers people paid through the HMRC’s Pay As You Earn (PAYE) system where their pay is reported through the Real Time Information (RTI) system.

Information presented in this release are experimental monthly estimates of the number of payrolled employees and their median earnings. It includes UK and geographical regions (NUTS1) early estimates of payrolled employment and median pay for the most recent month.

Statistics in this release are based on people who are employed in at least one job paid through HMRC’s PAYE system and the monthly estimates reflect the average for each day of the calendar month.

The publication and background information can be accessed on the ONS website.

Payrolled employments by nationality

Estimates are sourced from HMRC Pay as You Earn (PAYE) Real Time Information (RTI) data and HMRC’s Migrant Worker Scan (MWS). Nationality is reported by individuals when they register for a National Insurance number through the adult National Insurance number registration process.

All payrolled employments receiving paid renumeration in PAYE RTI within the reference period are included in the statistics. This will include some situations where an individual has not worked for a period e.g. if they have taken paid leave. These estimates do not cover self-employment.

Individuals who were furloughed as part of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) between April 2020 and the end of September 2021 will be included in the payrolled employment estimates from the HMRC PAYE system for this period.

The statistics in this release cover the period from 1 July 2014 to 31 December 2024 which covers a number of key dates relating to the UK’s exit from the EU and the Covid-19 pandemic. This is the fourth release of payrolled employments by nationality, region and industry.

Data are not seasonally adjusted so comparisons are made with the same month across years.

Payrolled employments cannot be directly compared to payrolled employee estimates which are released on a monthly basis as payrolled employees could have multiple payrolled employments. Therefore, payrolled employment estimates will follow the same trend as payrolled employees but the counts will be higher.

Regional locations for employments are recorded according to where the corresponding individual lives, not where they work. Where this information is missing, employments are assigned values based on historic trend proportions.

Textkernel online job adverts

Textkernel is the source of the ONS online job adverts data. Textkernel online job advert data is collected using comprehensive web-scraping software which downloads job advert information from approximately 90,000 job boards and recruitment pages. The scraped data includes job titles, descriptions, posting dates and expiration dates. These describe location, salary, seniority, skill requirements, home/office working, and more.

Textkernel perform some proprietary data cleaning to identify duplicate job adverts, which ONS have removed in this release. Duplication can occur when the same job is posted on multiple job boards, or when multiple recruiters advertise the job at the same time. Textkernel remove some adverts when they are low quality, e.g. if they are missing information, and remove adverts for jobs not based in the UK. Textkernel-based statistics are official statistics in development.

Information on how new online job adverts are assigned to geographical locations can be obtained from the ONS Measuring labour demand volumes across the UK using Textkernel data user guide

Reliability of estimates

Estimates from the ONS Annual Population Survey for January to December 2004 through to January to December 2024 are presented. For the latest time period, the sample size is around 9,300 households in Scotland.

The ONS Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Annual Population Survey (APS) are sample surveys. As such, these estimates are subject to an associated sampling error that decreases as the sample size increases. It is the nature of sampling variability that the smaller a group is the (proportionately) less precise an estimate is. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have published a detailed guidance note on this. Shading is one method used by ONS to indicate where estimates should be used with caution.

Employees who were furloughed between April 2020 and the end of September 2021 were classed as employed, but temporarily away from work. This is consistent with labour market definitions outlined by ONS.

Confidence Intervals

Confidence limits can be used to assess the range of values that the true value lies between. 95 per cent confidence intervals for rates are included in all tables and charts.

What does the 95 per cent confidence limit mean?

If, for example, we have an APS estimate and confidence limit of 63 per cent ± 1, this means that 19 times out of 20 we would expect the true rate to lie between 62 per cent and 64 per cent. Only in exceptional circumstances (1 in 20 times) would we expect the true rate to be outside the confidence interval around the APS estimate. Thus the smaller the confidence limits, the more reliable the estimate is.

Design factor

The Annual Population Survey is a household survey which provide estimates for individuals. The selection of households is based on a simple random sample of addresses but people within households often share characteristics, such as ethnicity. One method for accounting for this clustering of similar characteristics is to apply a design factor. Design factors attempt to adjust the variance of an estimate to account for loss of randomness in the sample. In some instances a cluster effect can be seen due to addresses being sampled but estimates being shown for individuals. 

The design factor itself is a positive number. When it is greater than 1 it indicates there is more variance in an estimate than there would be if the sample was truly random. Similarly, when it is less than 1 it indicates there is less variance in an estimate, and when it equals 1 it indicates the variance is the same as if the sample was truly random.

Scottish Government analysts do not have access to the design factors used by ONS in their calculations. As such, the confidence limits in this report are based on CIs calculated using a design factor of 1. This is not realistic for some estimates, such as ethnicity. However, it is to be expected that in most instances the design factor would be greater than 1 and not have varied significantly over time. This in turn leads us to expect that the CIs we have calculated are smaller than if the correct design factor was applied. As such, our CI estimates will likely be underestimating the variability of the data. Further information on estimating confidence intervals can be found in the LFS user guidance.

Statistical Significance

Statistical significance is based on 95 per cent Confidence Intervals. Statistical significance means that the change was large enough that it is unlikely to have resulted only from the variable nature of the sample.

Quality Assurance

Annual Population Survey data is collected and produced by the ONS.

When producing estimates for this publication, Scottish Government statisticians conduct in-depth quality assurance.

These checks include:

• analysis of the sample size obtained in the collection process
• production of estimates from the microdata using statistical software and relevant coding
• cross checking of coding between team members

Further checks relate to:

• crosschecking historical time series data with previously published results
• benchmarking the results against other relevant data sources