Pay failing to match soaring inflation in Northern Ireland, new figures from Nisra show

Median pay in Northern Ireland was listed as £2,012 per month in January - an increase of £76 on the same time last year or 3.9%.

With the latest official measure of inflation, published in December, well over 10% that means average workers are much worse off than they were a year ago.

Pay has grown more quickly in some sectors, however, although even in those industry sectors with the fastest wage growth pay increases are still failing to keep up with the soaring rate of inflation.

The Nisra figures show that the largest percentage increases over the year were recorded in the ‘Arts, entertainment and recreation’ (9.2%), ‘Information and communication’ (8.5%) and ‘Professional, scientific and technical’ (7.1%) sectors.

Meanwhile, the number of payrolled employees has increased over the month.

In January 2023, the seasonally adjusted number of people claiming some form of unemployment benefits was 35,900 (3.8% of the workforce), a decrease of 1.0% from the previous month’s revised figure. The January 2023 claimant count remains 20.5% higher than the pre-pandemic count in March 2020.

Commenting on the figures, a Nisra spokesperson said: "The latest labour market release shows that payrolled employee numbers and earnings have both increased over the year. Measures of total employment (e.g. employment rate and hours worked), unemployment and economic inactivity continue to show improvement over the year but have not yet returned to their pre-pandemic position.

"The latest HMRC payroll data shows that payrolled employee numbers increased by 0.1% over the month and are 2.0% above the figure recorded in January 2022. Payrolled earnings also increased over the month, by 0.2% and are 3.9% above the figure recorded in January 2022.

“There were 260 redundancies confirmed to the Department in January 2023, taking the rolling twelve-month total to 970. Although this is an increase when compared to recent rolling twelve-month totals, it is still one of the lowest twelve-month totals in the time series. There were 440 proposed redundancies notified to the Department in January 2023, bringing the rolling twelve-month proposed redundancies total to 1,960. Again, this was an increase when compared to recent rolling twelve-month totals but is still well below the long term trend.”

The spokesperson continued: “The claimant count estimate decreased over the month to January 2023 from the revised estimate for December 2022 following a trend of four consecutive monthly increases between September 2022 and December 2022. The claimant count rate remained the same as the revised rate for December 2022, the ninth consecutive month that this rate has been at 3.8%.

Results from the Labour Force Survey (LFS) show statistically significant increases in the employment rate over both the quarter and the year to October-December 2022 to 71.9%. The economic inactivity rate was 26.3% in October-December 2022, a statistically significant decrease over both the quarter and the year. In addition, the unemployment rate for October-December 2022 is 2.5%. Despite these changes, the employment rate remains 0.5pps below the pre-pandemic level recorded in October-December 2019, whilst the unemployment rate remains 0.1pps above the pre-pandemic position and the economic inactivity rate 0.4pps above the pre-pandemic rate.”