Quarterly PAYstats Pay and Labour Market Statistics, April 2021

Latest pay and labour market statistics April 2021:

• The Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH) rose by 1.0% in the 12 months to March 2021, up from 0.7% to February.
• The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 0.7% in the 12 months to March 2021, up from 0.4% to February 2021.
• 56,000 fewer people were in payrolled employment in March 2021 when compared with February 2021.
• The UK employment rate was estimated at 75.1%, 1.4 percentage points lower than a year earlier and 0.1 percentage points lower than the previous quarter.
• The UK unemployment rate was estimated at 4.9%, 0.9 percentage points higher than a year earlier but 0.1 percentage points lower than the previous quarter.
• The UK economic inactivity rate was estimated at 20.9%, 0.7 percentage points higher than a year earlier and 0.2 percentage points higher than the previous quarter.
• The total number of weekly hours worked was 959.9 million, down 92.3 million hours on the same period the previous year and down 20.1 million hours compared with the previous quarter.
• There were an estimated 607,000 job vacancies in January to March 2021, which is a 22.7% fall compared with a year ago.
• Growth in average total pay (including bonuses) among employees for the three months December 2020 to February 2021 was 4.5%, and growth in regular pay (excluding bonuses) was 4.4%; it is estimated that by removing the compositional effect, the underlying wage growth is around 2.5% for total and regular pay.