Introduction
This publication presents a time series of graduates, postgraduates, and non-graduates' employment and salaries living in England from 2007 to 2024.
For information on data processing and data quality of these statistics, please see the methodology note.
Statistics are available for the working age population (16-64 years old) and the young population (21-30 years old). This release focuses on estimates for the working age population, statistics covering the young population are available to download in the underlying data files.
The GLMS publication has previously reported a 'graduate premium' (the difference in average salaries of graduates and non-graduates) with caveats around the interpretation of this value due to the limitations in the available data. These limitations include the inability to control for external factors which can influence salary, such as prior academic attainment, in the available data. Therefore, a direct comparison in salary between postgraduates, graduates and non-graduates based on this data has been advised with caution. The 2024 release does not use the term ‘graduate premium’ to avoid any confusion in interpreting these statistics; however, the data can still be compared by users, and we have caveated the limitations in doing so.
Other publications on graduate employment and earnings
The Department for Education (DfE) and other bodies have also published research on the absolute, and lifetime returns to undergraduate degrees. For more detailed econometric analysis of the earnings and employment differentials between graduates and non-graduates, please see the links below:
- The returns to undergraduate degrees by socio-economic group and ethnicity (opens in a new tab)
- The impact of undergraduate degrees on early-career earnings (opens in a new tab)
- Undergraduate degrees: lifetime labour market returns (opens in a new tab)
- The impact of university degrees on the lifecycle of earnings: some further analysis (opens in a new tab)
The DfE also publish other statistics on graduate employment and earnings; LEO graduate and postgraduate outcomes.
Data source
Statistics presented in this publication use data from the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) Labour Force Survey (LFS). ONS have faced challenges around the falling number of responses to the LFS which has led to increased sampling variability.
ONS expect to see improvements to response levels and rates due the reintroduction of face-to-face interviews and a sample boost in October 2023 and January 2024, respectively. However, as these improvements will take time to materialise in the LFS data, LFS statistics are badged as "official statistics in development" until further review.
Coverage
In this publication, graduate type is defined as follows:
- Graduates are people whose highest qualification is an undergraduate degree at Bachelor’s level;
- Postgraduates are those holding a higher degree (such as a Master’s or PhD) as their highest qualification;
- Non-graduates are those whose highest qualification is below undergraduate level, i.e. National Qualification Framework Level 5 or below (see methodology note for more details).
All earnings data in this publication are calculated for full-time workers only and are rounded to the nearest £500. Differences between groups or across years are calculated from unrounded data.
Information on part-time employment patterns for graduates and non-graduates are also included. For these groups, part-time workers’ employment outcomes are broken down by age group and sex.
Caveats
As the results presented in this publication are based on survey data, they are estimates. Individual estimates may be inaccurate reflections of the true population, and differences between estimates may not be statistically significant.
This publication only provides simple outcome measures based on survey data and does not control for the differences in characteristics between graduates, postgraduates, and non-graduates. This means that the outcomes reported may not be wholly attributable to the fact that an individual holds a particular qualification, but instead could reflect other factors, such as their prior academic attainment, skills, experience, or geographic location.
The employment and earnings outcomes for 2020 and 2021 should be viewed against the backdrop of the significant adverse shock to the UK macroeconomy due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic which severely disrupted business activity in many sectors of the UK economy.
Please note, UK inflation peaked in October 2022 (see ONS: consumer price time series (opens in a new tab)). Real median salaries (adjusted for inflation) for graduates and postgraduates fell to their lowest levels in 2023 since the start of the GLMS series in 2007. In 2024, inflation fell and real salaries have stabilised.