Labour Market Trends: February 2025

Claimant Count

This information is based on experimental monthly estimates of the number of people claiming unemployment-related benefits.

The experimental Claimant Count includes Jobseeker’s Allowance Claimants and those claimants of Universal Credit who were claiming principally for the reason of being unemployed (those in the “searching for work” conditionality regime). Those claiming such benefits may be wholly unemployed and seeking work, or may be employed but with low income and/or low hours, that make them eligible for unemployment-related benefit support. As part of the response to the pandemic, the rules around who could claim Universal Credit had changed, meaning an increased proportion of those claiming may actually still be in some kind of work.

Commencing in May 2024, the Department for Work and Pensions rolled out an increase in the administrative earnings threshold for full work search conditionality. This change affected around 180,000 claimants in the UK over the summer of 2024, increasing the Claimant Count over that time. This policy change, along with two previous increases to the administrative earnings threshold in September 2022 and January 2023, represent discontinuities in the Claimant Count series.

In January 2025, the claimant count in Scotland was 110,600, an increase of 1,500 (1.4 per cent) over the month and an increase of 4,600 (4.3 per cent) over the year. The claimant count unemployment rate in January 2025 was 3.8 per cent, compared with 4.6 per cent for the UK as a whole.

Chart 5: Experimental claimant count rate for Scotland and the UK showed a large increase at the start of the pandemic, reaching a peak in August 2020 before starting to gradually decrease. The claimant count for Scotland and the UK were fairly constant between mid-2022 and 2023 although the gap has widened through 2024

Claimant Count rate, seasonally adjusted, Scotland and UK, January 2020 to January 2025

Source: Claimant count, ONS