The Office for National Statistics’ (ONS) recently published their latest statistics from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE). We now have a tool which allows you to explore the data.
Here is an overview of ASHE data and a brief outline of what is available in the tool.
About the data
The data for ASHE is collected in April every year. Pay As You Earn (PAYE) data is first used to identify representative subgroups of employers and employees. This group is then surveyed to get information on employee hours and earnings. The data does not include self-employed earnings.
During the pandemic, the labour market underwent significant changes, and earnings were also affected by furlough. Furthermore, the 2020 and 2021 data collections suffered from a decreased response rate for the survey, which has not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Due to these issues the ONS recommend focussing on long-term trends rather than year-on-year changes. Therefore, we have provided data from 1999 onwards when looking at changes over time. Note also that the latest estimates are provisional and are likely to change slightly when they get finalised.
Employee earnings in Scotland: the SPICe data tool
The earnings measure we use is median earnings. The median is the middle value of the data and it shows typical pay. Half of all employees earn less than the median, and half earn more.
Where we show hourly earnings, this excludes overtime pay. Hourly earnings excluding overtime are useful when trying to control for differences in levels of overtime and working patterns This measure is useful for comparing between local economies.
Our tool allows you to explore employee earnings data for Scotland. It currently includes four different analyses:
- Earnings overview: this shows annual, weekly and hourly earnings for all employees and those that work full-time or part-time. The data is broken down by UK nation and government region and shown over time.
- By local authority: this shows the variation of hourly earnings across local authorities. Data is available for the latest year.
- By sector, industry, or occupation: this shows the variation of hourly earnings across industries, sectors, or occupations. Data compares Scotland with the UK overall in the latest year.
- Gender pay gap: this shows hourly earnings for men and women in Scotland and the UK overall and the gender pay gap. The data is shown over time.
This is our first version of the tool, and we would appreciate any feedback you may have. Please send any feedback to spice@parliament.scot.
Data Visualisation Team, SPICe