ASHE 2018 data published
Nov 6th, 2018The 2018 release of the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), conducted in April 2018, was published on 26th October 2018.
Median gross weekly earnings for full-time employees increased for a fourth successive year, by 3.5%, to £569, as illustrated by the chart below:
The distribution of increases across the earnings spectrum broadly followed the trend of recent years, whereby earnings have tended to show greater growth, in percentage terms at least, amongst lower paid workers, as can be seen in the following chart:
This is likely to have been driven by the increase in the National Minimum Wage and National Living Wage rates of hourly pay that will have been included in the data collection in April 2018.
The “care, leisure and other service occupations” sector, in which ASHE 6115 sits, continues to include a disproportionately higher proportion of lower paid occupations of all those that are measured by the ONS in the ASHE survey.
Pleasingly though, ASHE 6115 at the 80th percentile (the most common measure used in periodical payments orders for care and case management) again showed relatively strong growth as compared with previous years, being up 4.08% against the 2017 figure.
The following table summarises the change in each percentile:
With inflation (as measured by the Consumer Prices Index) running at 2.43% in April 2018, it is pleasing to see that earnings growth has also been positive in ‘real’ terms too, across all centiles.