Study reveals the UK’s best towns and cities for job opportunities | FE News

New research has revealed which towns and cities have the best job opportunities for the people living and working within them.

The study, conducted by HR software provider Ciphr, compared employment data for 100 of the UK’s most populated towns and cities to determine which locations offer the best potential for job opportunities and good salaries.

Winchester came in first place, ahead of Warrington in second, and St Albans in third. Chelmsford, Sevenoaks, Preston, Cheltenham, Guildford, Aberdeen, and Reading also made the top 10.

Towns and cities were rated (out of 100) across multiple factors, such as average full-time earnings, recent pay growth, the latest employment and unemployment figures, employment rate growth, the number of job listings on Indeed, LinkedIn and Glassdoor (combined) per local worker, and business density – or the number of businesses in the area.

Housing costs, as well as life satisfaction and happiness scores, were also considered to reflect the town or city’s affordability and its residents’ general level of wellbeing.

Winchester – the city named ‘best for job opportunities’ in 2024 – scored consistently well across many criteria. Some of the reasons it stood out include a higher-than-average salary, a high and rising employment rate, and a very high number of businesses per capita.

Full-time workers living in Winchester typically earn £40,600 a year, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). That’s 16% above the UK’s average full-time pay of £34,963. The city’s average wages also saw double-digit growth of 14.8% in 2023 (across the UK it was just +5.8%).

Compared to most other UK towns and cities, Winchester’s unemployment rate is also relatively low at 2.7% and its employment rate is high at 81.1% (the UK averages, for the year to December 2023, were 3.7% and 75.7% respectively).

In 2023, the number of employers in Winchester district, with 10 staff or more, increased by 6.3% (vs 2.2% nationally), taking its tally to 179.1 businesses per 10,000 working-age adults (the UK average is 70.2 per 10,000). If micro-enterprises with over five employees are included too, that number rises to 314.9 per 10,000 (compared to 144.1 per 10,000 for the rest of the UK).

The city is less competitive in terms of housing affordability though. Rental properties in Winchester average £1,200 a month – over a third (35%) of full-time pay. While properties sold for an average price of £665,891 in the last year – that’s a staggering 16.4 times the average full-time worker’s earnings here.

Based on Ciphr’s study, the top 15 UK towns and cities for job opportunities are:

1. Winchester
2. Warrington
3. St Albans
4. Chelmsford
5. Sevenoaks
6. Preston
7. Cheltenham
8. Guildford
9. Aberdeen
10. Reading
11. Bedford
12. Solihull
13. Wokingham
14. Stafford
15. Stratford-upon-Avon

Best towns and cities for high salaries

Good pay may not be the only decider when it comes to choosing where people work but it’s usually a significant motivator for many job hunters. The city with the highest average wages, by quite a margin, is St Albans. Its median full-time salary is 36% above the UK average at £47,641.

The next best-paying city is London, with an average salary of £41,853, followed by the towns of Warwick and Sevenoaks.

Sevenoaks is also the best town for inflation-beating salary growth. People living here saw one of the UK’s biggest increases in pay, since 2022, at 18.2% (taking its median salary to £41,239).

Other places that reported bumper annual pay rises include Southend-on-Sea (17.3% salary growth), Plymouth (16%), Blackburn (14.8%), Preston (14.8%) and Winchester (14.8%).

Best towns and cities for job hunters

For those job hunting right now, there are more open vacancies advertised on Indeed, LinkedIn and Glassdoor combined (per person) in Cambridge, Manchester, and Bristol than for any other towns and cities in the study.

Analysis of data from these three job sites, earlier this month, found that there were 1,151 job postings in Cambridge per 10,000 local workers, 807 in Manchester, and 779 in Bristol (the UK average is around 243).

Other locations that rank well for job listings include Oxford (with 770 listings per 10,000 working age residents), Exeter (750), Reading (727), Gloucester (702), Ipswich (604), Southampton (595), and Cheltenham (562).

Generally, towns and cities with higher numbers of employers do tend to have more jobs and employment opportunities available, than those with fewer employers. And London, Birmingham and Leeds do have by far the most businesses with 10 or more employees – at 51,455, 4,075 and 3,745 respectively. But, when these figures are adjusted to account for the number of local workers, it’s Winchester and Stratford-upon-Avon that have the highest density of employers at 179.1 and 107.3 per 10,000 working-age adults respectively.

Chichester also has an above-average density of businesses, with 98.5 per 10,000 local workers, followed by Sevenoaks (90.6 per 10,000), Warwick (89), and Guildford (87.2).

Most affordable towns and cities to buy or rent

The rise in remote and hybrid working may have enabled more people to live further away from their places of work, but in-office or on-site working (some or all the time) is still the norm for most UK workers. Indeed, a Ciphr poll of 1,000 UK adults last year found that only around 8% of employees work 100% remotely, while 40% split their time between home and work.

An area’s level of affordability can have a big impact, however, on how far wages stretch – even for higher earners – especially when the cost of nearly everything has soared in the last few years.

The average UK property costs £281,000 to buy or around £1,226 per month to rent (as of April 2024, according to the HM Land Registry and Zoopla respectively). This means a typical full-time employee would need to spend eight times their annual earnings (of £34,963) to buy a property, or 42% of their salary to rent one.

The title for least affordable location (compared to average salaries) in Ciphr’s study belongs to London, closely followed by Sevenoaks, Guildford, Oxford, and Brighton and Hove.

At the opposite end of the scale, housing is more affordable to buy or rent (compared to average salaries) in Stockton-on-Tees, Blackburn, Preston, Wigan, and Hull.

The best places for renters are Hull, Doncaster and Barnsley, as the average rent is around 20% of the average salary – leaving 80% for other expenses. The most expensive is London, where the rent-to-income ratio is 47%.

The best town for home buyers is Stockton-on-Tees, where an average property costs £146,465 (according to Rightmove), which is 4.5 times the average income there. In comparison, people living in Guildford will need 20.9 times the average salary to buy an average property priced at £840,608.

Ciphr ranked 100 of the UK’s largest towns and cities across 10 metrics – average salary, salary growth, business density, growth in the number of businesses, employment rate, employment rate growth, unemployment rate, number of job listings per 10,000 working adults, rental and homeownership affordability, and life satisfaction and personal happiness – to determine the best UK towns and cities for job opportunities.

Each town or city was allocated points (out of 100) based on where they ranked between the highest and lowest values for each metric – for example, the place with the highest average salary scored 100, while the location with the lowest salary scored 1 (the results were then weighted to calculate the final score/ranking).