Average Earnings excl. Bonus

Average Earnings excl. Bonus is the regular-pay measure within Average Weekly Earnings (AWE), the lead monthly gauge of earnings per employee. The Office for National Statistics, the UK statistics producer, builds it from the Monthly Wages and Salaries Survey. The survey covers around 9,000 employers and about 13.8 million staff.

It covers cash pay before tax on payrolls in Great Britain, excluding Northern Ireland. It leaves out the self-employed, armed forces, trainees, bonuses and arrears. Headline growth is a seasonally adjusted three-month average, less volatile than one month.

It is no gauge of hourly rates or settlements, since headcount, not hours, is the denominator. Shifts between full-time and part-time work, or toward high-paid industries, move the average with no actual rise. It differs from the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings and from the quarterly Index of Labour Costs per Hour.

Businesses report total regular pay, bonus pay, arrears and headcount each month, split between weekly-paid and monthly-paid staff. Only the reference month and the month before count.

It appears monthly in the labour-market release at 07:00 UK time, with dates set 12 months ahead. It follows 6 to 7 weeks after the month ends, sometimes a week later after Christmas or Easter. The newest month is provisional; the prior month is revised.

Unadjusted data finalise next month; later change needs major errors or method shifts. Arrears count when paid without rewriting history. Adjusted series also revise the prior two months and year-earlier months, with the yearly review reaching back three years. Each release brings EARN01, EARN02 and EARN03 tables, the X09 real-pay supplement, decomposition tables and sampling-variability tables.

Moves come from firm-level pay and shifts in the staff mix across high- and low-paid sectors.

• Whole economy (100%): the headline aggregate across all sectors.
• Private sector (about 81%): pay across private firms.
• Public sector (about 19%): government and public-service pay, often moved by award timing.
• Services: the largest employer: finance, business, retail, hotels and restaurants.
• Manufacturing, construction and energy: pay in the goods industries, with construction often the slowest grower.
• Bonus and arrears: payouts outside regular pay that lift total pay when disbursed.

In the 15 August 2023 bulletin for April to June 2023, regular pay grew 7.8%, the fastest since records began in 2001. Total pay grew 8.2% on one-off NHS bonuses paid in June 2023, above the underlying rate. In real terms, total pay rose 0.5% and regular pay 0.1% as CPIH inflation averaged 7.7%.

It warned of larger-than-usual revisions on late NHS pay data and the yearly review. Adjusted levels were £663 for total and £613 for regular pay in June 2023, with growth of 8.2% private and 6.2% public.

1. Weeklyise: all pay moves to a weekly base, dividing monthly pay by about 4.348 weeks. The last week of the month counts, and fortnightly pay is halved.
2. Impute: missing regular pay and headcount carry forward from the latest valid return, up to 5 months. Bonus per employee follows the same month a year earlier, or the rest are reweighted.
3. Outliers: each business is set against peers by size, industry and ownership. Extremes take a weight of 1 and represent only themselves.
4. Weight: each respondent stands for peers from the Inter-Departmental Business Register by status, size and industry, updated monthly. Smaller firms below 20 staff use a pay factor from the hours and earnings survey.
5. Level: the average divides weighted total pay by weighted staff in pounds per week. Illustration: £8,960m across 12.8m staff gives £700.00 a week and about 220.8 on the 2000 = 100 index.
6. Seasonal adjustment: the 27 headline series for total, bonus and regular pay are adjusted singly with X13-ARIMA. Adjusted regular plus bonus need not equal adjusted total, and arrears stay out of the inputs.
7. Growth: unadjusted growth is the yearly change for the month. The headline compares the latest three adjusted months with the same three a year earlier. Illustration: £698.00 against £674.70 a year earlier gives about 3.5%.
8. Real pay: unadjusted pay over CPIH inflation on a 2015 = 100 base, then adjusted. The X09 supplement repeats the calculation using the Consumer Prices Index. Illustration: £700.00 over 141.4 gives about £495.05 at 2015 prices.