Member Article

North East salaries increasing faster than UK average

The average salary in the North East of England has increased 11.6% to £28,515, the highest increase in the UK, according to Adzuna’s UK Job Market Report in December 2014.

The average advertised salary in the UK in November was £34,549, a 5.8% increase compared to £32,651 a year ago.

These salary increases come as the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) grew by just 1% in the year to November 2014, down from 1.3% in October.

This means that average annual salary increases continue to outpace CPI inflation as a trend towards real wage growth continues for the fourth month in a row. The number of advertised vacancies reached 949,788 across the UK – the largest number of advertised jobs since the recession, overtaking the previous record of 936,596 vacancies in October 2014.

There was a 23.6% year-on-year increase in available jobs: just 768,289 vacancies were advertised in the equivalent month last year.

Along with the North East, Yorkshire and The Humber (10.76%) and North West England (8.78%) have jostled Wales (8.44%) out of the pole position it had been enjoying thanks to the Jobs Growth Wales initiative.

Average Northern salaries remain lower than in the South, but at the current rates of change this may not remain the case for long – expect the North to surge forward in 2015.

Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, said: “A manufacturing boom has buoyed the Northern jobs market this year. The traditional home of manufacturing in the UK is seeing a new demand for highly-skilled labour, which is reflected in healthy annual wage growth. “There is a more complicated picture for Scotland, another region where average salaries are tightly tied to a dominant job sector – waning salaries in Energy, Oil and Gas have been compounded across the region by recent political instability.

“However, advertised salaries still managed to grow on average in 2014. The margin of growth was undeniably lower than the increases enjoyed by the rest of the UK.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ellen Forster .