Historical trend
Trend summary
UK real regular pay grew 2.1% in the year to February 2025, measured as average weekly earnings excluding bonuses, deflated by CPI.
Trend
- Real wage growth turned positive in mid-2023 after two years of negative real growth during the 2021–23 inflation surge.
- Nominal AWE regular pay grew 5.9% year-on-year in February 2025, with CPI at 2.8% in the same period.
- Cumulative real pay remains below its pre-financial-crisis peak on some longer-run measures.
Context
- The ONS Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) series covers Great Britain; it is seasonally adjusted and excludes arrears of pay.
- Real wages deflated by CPIH (which includes housing costs) show a smaller recovery than CPI-deflated measures.
Trend summary generated by claude-sonnet-4-6 on 18 March 2025. Contains no editorial judgement — describes direction, magnitude, and official projections only.
G7 comparison
🇬🇧 United Kingdom
3.7 %
🇩🇪 Germany
2.8 %
🇺🇸 United States
1.2 %
🇫🇷 France
0.9 %
🇯🇵 Japan
-0.5 %
About this indicator
- Source
- ONS / OECD
- Update frequency
- Monthly
- Last updated
- 16 June 2026
- Licence
- OGL v3
- Rising trend is…
- Positive
Statistics
- Latest
- 3.7 %
- Period high
- 10.3
- Period low
- -6.0
- Period average
- 3.5