National Statistical

Today the ONS has published the latest data from its Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), which provides critical insights about the earnings of employees in the UK and informs decisions, such as the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage, affecting citizens and businesses across the UK. Liz McKeown and Kate Davies look at the findings and the improvements made to the survey over the past year.

A better experience for businesses

Last year, when we published the 2025 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) results, we wrote about the work underway to strengthen and modernise the survey. A year on, we are pleased to report on progress we have made.

We have achieved an important milestone in the modernisation of ASHE when we transitioned to full digital data collection this year. While many larger businesses have been responding electronically for several years, this final step saw all remaining businesses move to our electronic questionnaire.

The move to digital collection has made it easier and faster for businesses to respond. As a result, we are receiving data from more businesses than ever before, and we are receiving it earlier. We’ve also improved how we follow up with businesses and check the data we receive, including working more closely with some of the largest and most complex businesses.

Following its introduction last year, our ClassifAI tool continues to efficiently and effectively allocate occupation codes to responses. Using data from the previous year, the tool is able to allocate codes with greater accuracy while providing a time saving that enables more data to be collected, further strengthening the quality of our earnings statistics.

Support from businesses has also enabled us to publish this year’s results almost a week ahead of schedule, ensuring that the latest earnings data are available to inform evidence for the Budget.

Stronger data for better-informed decisions

As announced in October’s quarterly progress update on our ONS surveys and economic statistics improvement plan, these enhancements have led to a record achieved sample in 2026, with around 197,000 employee records compared with around 174,000 at this point in 2025. Additionally, digitised collections mean we are now hearing from more smaller businesses, with the response rate for micro businesses (which have less than 10 employees) increasing from 36% to 41%.

The larger and more representative sample improves the quality and precision of this year’s level estimates. However, as with every ASHE release, users should take care when interpreting changes over time because differences between years can reflect changes in the composition of the workforce and survey sample, as well as genuine changes in earnings. This consideration is particularly important in 2026, given the effect of improvements to data collection on the ASHE achieved sample size. We remind users that our preferred measure of average earnings is based on a median rather than a mean measure because the median is less affected by changes in the relatively small number of very high earners, compared to the mean.

In this context, it is also worth noting that each earnings data source has different strengths. ASHE provides a detailed annual picture of earnings levels and how they vary across jobs, groups and parts of the UK. Average Weekly Earnings provides the timelier measure of economy-wide earnings growth and is the lead source for assessing change over time.

What this year’s results tell us

The accompanying ASHE publications draw on this rich detail to provide deeper insights into employee earnings, low and high pay, and the gender pay gap.

The headline findings provide a snapshot of this much broader picture: the proportion of low-paid employee jobs remained low at 2.8%, although it increased slightly this year, while the gender pay gap for full-time employees continued to narrow, reaching 6.8% in April 2026.

Looking ahead: the next chapter for ASHE

We know there is continued interest in ASHE’s weighting approach. External research has suggested that the current approach could leave jobs in smaller businesses underrepresented in the weighted estimates.

Over the past year, we have improved data collection and increased responses from smaller businesses, helping to reduce this underrepresentation in the achieved sample. This provides a stronger evidence base for our continuing review of ASHE’s weighting and other statistical methods, through which we will assess whether further improvements are needed. We will keep users updated as this work progresses.

Over the next year, we will also continue work to modernise the infrastructure that supports ASHE to improve our operational resilience further.

Our quarterly Earnings User Group and the Earnings Symposium in January 2027 will provide further opportunities for users to inform the next phase of this work, helping to ensure ASHE continues to provide robust and relevant earnings statistics.

None of this progress would be possible without the businesses who take the time to respond to ASHE. Thank you for helping us build a stronger survey and better earnings statistics.

Tell us what you think

We look forward to sharing further progress as our work continues and we welcome feedback both on the steps we’ve already taken and on our priorities for the future, please contact: earnings@ons.gov.uk.