Slight drop in payroll employees at Northern Ireland firms

The number of employees on company payrolls in Northern Ireland dropped slightly last month to 803,000, latest HMRC figures show.

However, there was a monthly 0.1% increase in median employee pay to £2,291, which marked a 6.5% increase over the year.

PAYE data from HMRC, including in a monthly round-up of employment figures from the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency (Nisra) showed there had been a decrease of 0.3% over the month in employees on company payrolls. However, the number had grown 0.6% over the year.

And HMRC’s earnings data showed a median monthly pay of £2,291 in December, up £2 over the month and by £139, or 6.5%, over the year.

The latest unemployment rate for September to November was estimated at 1.7% from the separate Labour Force Survey. That was down 0.1 percentage points over the quarter and down 0.7 percentage points over the year.

The employment rate rose by 0.5pps over the quarter to 72.6% – and increase of 0.2pps over the year.

There were 30.3 million hours worked in the quarter, up 5.3% on the quarter before and up 2.6% on the same period last year.

Economic activity dropped over the quarter by 0.4pps to 26.1%, though it had climbed over the year at the same rate.

And the claimant count in December stood at 40,000, or 4.1% of the workforce, which was down 1.4% from November’s revised figure. However, the measure is still 33.9% higher than the pre-pandemic count of March 2020.

But in positive news, the number of redundancies for 2024 was “considerably lower” than the year before, Nisra said. There were 240 redundancies confirmed in December, while over 2024 as a whole, there were 1,840 – 70% of the number confirmed in the year before.

Proposed redundancies were also down by the same percentage, dropping from 4,300 to 2,980.

According to the Department for the Economy, which provides redundancy figures to Nisra, the 12-month totals for redundancies are similar to the levels seen in the decade preceding the pandemic.

Mark McAllister, chief executive of the Labour Relations Agency, said the fall in month-on-month PAYE employee figures could be interpreted as a sign of the labour market starting to cool.

But he said that continued high economic inactivity was the uppermost concern. “There is little doubt that this policy issue is recognised as being the most challenging and requires long-term solutions and a seismic shift in policy direction on everything from benefits to flexible working.”