Employee Jobs Below the Real Living Wage 2025

This is the Living Wage Foundation’s 14th annual report on the scale of low pay in the UK, based on ONS data from 2025. 

Our research shows that in 2025, 14.6 per cent of employee jobs were paid below the real Living Wage, representing 4.4 million jobs. This is a modest improvement, with the share of low pay falling by 1.1 percentage point compared with the previous year. Although this suggests low pay is moving in the right direction overall, progress remains very uneven at a local level, with many of the worst-hit local authorities seeing their share of low paid jobs rise. It also follows the sharpest annual rise in low pay in the year before, which has not been fully reversed.

While inflation has eased since its recent peak in 2023, the overall price level remains much higher than before the cost-of-living crisis. This matters because low-income families have been disproportionately affected by rising costs since they spend a greater share of their income on essentials like food and electricity which have seen higher inflation rates. 

Taken together, the improvement in our headline estimate of jobs paid below the real Living Wage hides a more complex picture, and should be interpreted cautiously. Living costs remain historically high, and low pay continues to be a significant challenge in the UK labour market.

Our findings show low pay doesn’t fall evenly across the workforce, with some groups most affected:

• Place-based disparities:
  • The areas with the highest proportion of jobs below the real Living Wage were the North East (18.8 per cent), Northern Ireland (17.3 per cent), and the East Midlands (17.2 per cent).
  • Some of the worst affected local areas have seen things get worse, not better: of the 25 local authorities with the highest rate of low pay, nearly three quarters (72 per cent) experienced increases in the rate of low paid work, compared to a third of all local authorities.
     
• Part-time workers: Part-time roles were more than three times as likely to be low paid than full-time employees, (29.7 per cent vs 8.8 per cent) and accounted for over half (56.3 per cent) of all low paid jobs. This matters because low hourly pay is particularly difficult to manage when it’s paired with insufficient working hours.
   
• Industry: Over half of hospitality jobs were low paid (53.1 per cent), the highest proportion by far of any industry. The retail and wholesale industry had the highest number of jobs below the real Living Wage, with more than a million low paid jobs in 2025.
   
• Occupation: Sales occupations (e.g. retail assistants) had the highest proportion and number of jobs paid below the real Living Wage in 2025, with half (50.9 per cent) of all sales jobs low paid, representing over 650,000 jobs.
   
• Young workers: Workers aged 18-21 were by far the age group most likely to be low paid, with over half (57.0 per cent) of all jobs paid below the real Living Wage.