{"id":404284,"date":"2026-04-22T00:48:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T00:48:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/404284\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T00:48:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T00:48:18","slug":"uk-february-ilo-unemployment-rate-4-9-vs-5-2-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/404284\/","title":{"rendered":"UK February ILO unemployment rate 4.9% vs 5.2% expected"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Prior 5.2%Employment change 25k vs 35k expectedPrior 84kAverage weekly earnings +3.8% vs +3.6% 3m\/y expectedPrior +3.9%; revised to +4.1%Average weekly earnings (ex bonus) +3.6% vs +3.5% 3m\/y expectedPrior +3.8%March payrolls change -11kPrior 20k; revised to -6k<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">The standout number is the one in the headline, which sees the jobless rate fall back to its lowest since August last year. It is a bit of an anomaly considering that payrolls data is continuing to decline further, with a negative revision to February as well. ONS continues to put out a caveat though that it is still experiencing data quality issues and advises caution in interpreting the survey numbers.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">The claimant count for March does show an increase from 17.1k (revised) in February to a provisional estimate of 26.8k, which likely will be revised further next month.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">The good news at least is that there continues to be some improvement in the Labour Force Survey (LFS) response rate. And that is enough to see ONS publish a bulletin update alongside the report today <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ons.gov.uk\/employmentandlabourmarket\/peopleinwork\/employmentandemployeetypes\/articles\/labourforcesurveyqualityupdate\/april2026#impact-on-response-rate-and-levels\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\" class=\"article-link\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">All in all, it&#8217;s a bit of a tough one to try and use this one statistical outlier of a data point to try and conclude much about the UK labour market outlook. But from the trend in payrolls data, one can argue that actual conditions are softening but on a gradual basis.<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-align-justify\" data-v-4026719d=\"\">As for wages data, we are seeing some cooling there with real wages also dipping further to the lowest in the three months to June 2023. But with cost-push inflation set to enter into the picture, that will keep the BOE on their toes in terms of balancing their policy outlook for the months ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prior 5.2%Employment change 25k vs 35k expectedPrior 84kAverage weekly earnings +3.8% vs +3.6% 3m\/y expectedPrior +3.9%; revised to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21877,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[114,184,85,46],"class_list":["post-404284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=404284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404284\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}