The number of payrolled employees in Northern Ireland increased by 0.9% over the year to September 2026, reaching 820,600, according to figures from HMRC PAYE data released today by the Northern Ireland Statistics & Research Agency. Median monthly pay rose to £2,508, an increase of £83 or 3.4% compared with September 2025.

The employment rate for people aged 16 to 64 was estimated at 72.5% for June to August 2026, up 1.3 percentage points from the same period a year earlier. The number of employed people aged 16 and over was 908,000, an annual increase of 21,000.

The unemployment rate stood at 2.1%, down 0.3 percentage points over the year but up 0.3 percentage points from the previous quarter. None of the quarter-on-quarter changes in the Labour Force Survey headline measures were statistically significant.

Economic inactivity among 16 to 64 year olds was 25.9%, a decrease of 1.1 percentage points over the year. Total weekly hours worked in Northern Ireland were an estimated 28.4 million, down 0.9% on the equivalent period last year.

The seasonally adjusted claimant count was 32,700 in September 2026, representing 3.2% of the workforce. This was a fall of 0.6% from the revised August figure but remained 9.6% higher than the pre-pandemic level in March 2020.

Confirmed redundancies totalled 1,570 in the year to September 2026, around a third lower than the 2,350 recorded in the previous 12 months. Proposed redundancies over the same period numbered 2,920, similar to the 2,910 of the prior year.