Another look and financial and related professional services labour demand

We have updated our proxy dataset to analyse demand for some types of financial and related professional services jobs over time and by UK region

Jobs numbers and labour market trends are receiving considerable public, policymaker and media attention at the moment, and it’s been some time since I used this blog to analyse trends in financial services employment—so an update seemed very topical.

Official job vacancy data is based on a survey of businesses. Across the UK, the number of job vacancies in financial services averaged around 33,000 in the first three quarters of 2025, broadly unchanged from the year-earlier period.

Financial services job vacancies

Source: Office for National Statistics

Vacancies are not a perfect metric, as there are reasons a firm might advertise a role other than the need to fill that role. Nevertheless, they are an indication of labour demand. In particular, they are a good indicator of trends, when the data are examined over a period of time. Taking a longer view, over the past five years, demand for UK financial services employment (as measured by online job vacancies) rose sharply over 2020-2022, peaking at 56,000 in April-June 2022, and has declined steadily since then.

In this context, ‘financial services’ refers to a specific classification of companies based on their type of economic activity (Standard Industrial Classification). ‘Financial services’ job vacancies therefore comprise all job vacancies in finance, insurance and an ‘other’ category called ‘activities auxiliary to financial services and insurance activities’. These vacancies could be for what we would tend to think of as a finance job—for example, an equity research analyst or an insurance broker. But they could also be for a non-finance specific job in a financial services company—for example, a software engineer or a data analyst. The data therefore tell us something about demand for labour among financial services firms, but nothing—necessarily—about demand for particular roles within the industry.

To examine this, we have used “official statistics in development”[1] from the ONS to focus on roles that are within the financial and related professional services industry, and unlikely to be in any other industry. These are:

The ONS published data using Textkernel online job adverts data.[2] They show volumes of online job adverts by different geographies for these and 406 other occupations.

Online job adverts for selected financial services and related professional services roles

Source: TheCityUK calculations based on ONS data from Textkernel.

The data show that for the seven roles that we can confidently say are in the financial and related professional services industry (five in financial services and two in related professional services), online job advertisements declined sharply and steadily from 2022 until the last quarter of 2024. At that point, there was a modest recovery which was sustained over the subsequent three quarters—the latest data available is for Q3 2025.

In the July-September 2025 quarter there were 31,884 online job advertisements for the financial services roles, up from 25,425 a year earlier but down from a peak of 54,201 in the post-pandemic hiring boom in January-March 2022. For the two related professional services roles, online advertisements totalled 11,347 in the latest quarter, up from 9,299 a year earlier and a peak of 31,220 in January-March 2022.

Our analysis at a regional level showed no significant variations in this trend in any particular region. Use the filters in the chart below to view the data by region.

This analysis comes with many caveats. Our proxy dataset is not representative of the entire financial and related professional services industry. For example, we excluded some roles that are commonly found within the industry because they are also commonly found outside the industry—for example, roles such as financial managers and directors were excluded because they are commonly found both within and outside the financial and professional services industry. In addition, there are many roles which are likely to be exclusively in the industry which are not included because they are not covered by Textkernel’s data—for example, portfolio manager. Because of these exclusions, and because of the focus on ‘core’ financial and related professional services roles, the reality of labour demand in the industry may look slightly different to our findings.

However, it is noteworthy that the trend shown by the alternative data aligns well with the official data. This indicates that our proxy dataset offers credible insights into demand for selected occupations that are core financial and related professional services roles, on a region-by-region basis. The slight upturn in online job advertisements in recent quarters is encouraging, and implies a possibility of higher vacancies and stronger recruitment into the industry in the months ahead.

[1] Labour demand volumes by Standard Occupation Classification (SOC 2020), UK - Office for National Statistics. The ONS notes “These statistics should be treated as official statistics in development (previously known as experimental statistics), as they are still subject to testing the ability to meet user needs and may be modified in the future.”

[2] The ONS explains that “Textkernel data is collected using comprehensive web-scraping software which downloads job advert information from approximately 90,000 job boards and recruitment pages. The scraped data includes job titles, descriptions, posting dates and expiration dates. Additionally, Textkernel provide variables which are derived from the scraped data using data science and natural language processing methods. These describe location, salary, seniority, skill requirements, home/office working, and more. Textkernel perform some proprietary data cleaning to identify duplicate job adverts, which ONS have removed in this release. Duplication can occur when the same job is posted on multiple job boards, or when multiple recruiters advertise the job at the same time.”