Business Register and Employment Survey: 2019

Main points

In 2019 there were 1.269 million employee jobs in Wales, a slight percentage decrease on the figure of 1.270 million in 2018 For the UK, there was a 1.2% increase between 2018 and 2019.

There were increases in 10 of the 12 UK countries and English regions between 2018 and 2019, with Wales having the smallest percentage decrease (down 0.1%). Scotland had the only other decrease (down 0.2%).

The change in Wales between 2018 and 2019 was spread across a number of industry sectors, with the largest absolute increase in the Accommodation & Food Services sector (up 16,600) followed by the Wholesale sector (up 13,700). The largest fall was in the Health sector (down 14,900).

In 2019, the Health sector was the largest industry in Wales, accounting for 15.6% of all employee jobs, followed by 11.2% in the Manufacturing sector, 9.4% in the Retail sector and 9.3% in the Accommodation & Food Services sector.

In 2019 there were 300,500 public sector employee jobs and 968,100 private sector employee jobs in Wales. The share of these jobs was 23.7% public and 76.3% private (in the UK this was 17.3% public and 82.7% private). Please note that these estimates of public sector employee jobs differ to those of the official public sector employment estimates. The official estimates should be regarded as the definitive public sector estimates for the English regions and UK countries.

Note

As the demand increases for statistics and data to measure the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have had to change our data gathering and release practices, focussing efforts on priority analysis and statistics. Therefore, the accompanying StatsWales datasets will be updated at a later date. The BRES data are publicly available via NOMIS.