in the United Kingdom in 2024, down from a peak of over five million in early 2020. Although self-employment was growing at a fairly consistent pace before 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduced self-employment in the UK, falling by around 782,000 workers in one year. While there has been a recent uptick since 2022, self-employment in the UK has struggled to reach previous levels, and it will likely be some time before self-employment fully recovers from the pandemic.
What type of workers are self-employed in the UK?
Through self-employed workers perform a variety of different jobs, the most common
industry sector as of 2024 was in construction, which had approximately 745,000 workers. Although there are
more self-employed men than self-employed women, the gap between the two has narrowed in recent years. As of 2024, there were approximately 2.75 million self-employed men, and 1.57 million women, a gap of around 1.18 million, compared with 1.44 million in 2000. Self-employed workers were also more likely to work
full-time, rather than
part-time, with around 2.87 million full-time workers to 1.42 million part-time ones. Self-employed workers are however,
more likely to work longer hours than the wider workforce, with around one in five of them working more than 45 hours a week, compared with 14.9 percent of
people in employment.
Impact of COVID-19
As seen in the figures mentioned above, self-employment in the UK has struggled to return to pre-pandemic levels. Just as huge numbers of workers were supported by the government's
furlough scheme at the time, the UK government also introduced a similar scheme for self-employed workers. Through the
self-employment income support scheme, approximately 2.7 million self-employed workers received government financial assistance between May and July 2020. This was followed by a second scheme that had 2.4 million workers on it, and ran from September to November 2020, and a third one with 2.19 workers between December 2020 and January 2021. The
cost of these three schemes to the UK government was approximately 7.8 billion pounds for the first tranche, 5.9 billion pounds for the second, and 6.2 billion pounds for the last one. Despite this assistance, self-employment evidently suffered a blow during this time period, and although
self-employment bankruptcies remained relatively low during the subsequent period they has been a slight uptick in early 2023.
This text provides general information. Statista assumes no
liability for the information given being complete or correct.
Due to varying update cycles, statistics can display more up-to-date
data than referenced in the text.
