Northern Ireland’s unemployment rate has sunk to a new low of 1.6%, a drop of 0.7 percentage points over the year, a government report said today.
The Labour Force Survey said the unemployment rate of 1.6% for October to December 2024 was down 0.1pps over the quarter.
And it said the employment rate among those aged 16 to 64 had gone up 0.1pps over the quarter, but dropped 0.8pps over the year to 72.1%.
The survey, released by the Department for the Economy and compiled by the NI Statistics and Research Agency, estimated the number of weekly hours worked at 29.6 million from October to December.
That was up around 3% on both the quarter before and the same period in 2023 – a trend which Nisra said was “statistically significant”.
It was 0.5% above the pre-pandemic position of October-December 2019 and just 1.2% below the record level of 30 million hours per week in April to June 2019.
The department also released data from HMRC, which showed that there were 806,700 people in NI on the PAYE system in January, a rise of 0.2% over the month and of 1% over the year.
And employees had a median monthly pay of £2,290 in January, an increase of £2 (0.1%) over the month and £149 (7.0%) over the year.
The Labour Force Survey also reported that the economic inactivity rate – those who are not working and are not available to work – was unchanged on the quarter before at 26.6%. However, it was up 1.3pps on the year before.
And the separate claimant count measure was 40,000, or 4.2% of the workforce, up 1.1% on December’s revised figure. It was 34% higher than the pre-pandemic count of March 2020.
And numbers of proposed and confirmed redundancies were lower. Nisra said it had received confirmation that 50 redundancies took place last month. Over the year February 2024 to January 2025, 1,850 redundancies were confirmed, which was approximately four-fifths of the of the figure for the previous year.
There were 440 proposed redundancies in January 2025, taking the annual total to 3,270, which was around four-fifths of the figure for the previous year (4,000).