UK Payrolled Workers Fall by 19,000 in July 2026 After ONS Revision

Revised ONS figures show the number of UK payrolled employees dropped by 19,000 between June and July 2026, worsening an earlier provisional estimate and extending a two-year downward trend.

The UK had around 30.3 million payrolled employees in July 2026, the figures show — down 19,000 from June, and down 101,000 compared with July 2025, a year-on-year fall of around 0.3 per cent. The Office for National Statistics posted the revised estimate on or around 14–15 September 2026, drawing on HMRC’s Pay As You Earn Real Time Information data, which captures payroll submissions from employers across the country in near-real time.

The revision matters because ONS had previously put the June-to-July monthly fall at just 13,000, in provisional figures published in August 2026. As more employers submitted their RTI returns, that estimate worsened by 6,000. ONS publishes a dedicated “revision triangle” dataset specifically to track how these early estimates shift — a reminder that the first read on any monthly payroll figure is not the final one.

That’s a sustained slide. ONS notes payrolled employment has been broadly declining for roughly two years, with a continued fall recorded in the three months to June 2026 before the revised July figure.

For Kent, the picture has to be pieced together from regional data rather than a dedicated county-level series — ONS does not routinely publish PAYE RTI breakdowns at individual county granularity. The South East region, which includes Kent, accounts for around 1.676 million employee jobs in total. Medway alone carries about 98,000 of those, split roughly 67,000 full-time and 31,000 part-time, based on ONS Business Register and Employment Survey data via NOMIS. A sustained national fall in payrolled employment suggests some employers across the South East may be pulling back on headcount or limiting new hires, which could tighten the local jobs market for workers in Kent and those commuting across the region.

ONS regional analysis shows payrolled employee numbers fell over the year to July 2026 in every UK region and country except Northern Ireland, where they increased. The PAYE RTI series covers employees paid through PAYE only — self-employed workers not on a payroll are excluded, so the full employment picture is broader than these figures alone capture.