Financial services hiring in the UK has never been so average
Working in financial services in London can sometimes inspire some daydreaming. How good things were in the past, how good things are elsewhere. But the truth might be that we are in some of the most normal times in London’s financial history.
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Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), released today, showed that there were 30,000 national vacancies in the financial services sector, on average, in the June-August period. That was pretty much the same as the May-July period, according to the ONS.
“Pretty much the same” ought to be the rallying cry of the UK’s financial services industry. Since 2001, the ONS’ data shows that there were 33k vacancies per month, on average, across the period. Since 2019, including both the pandemic and the post-lockdown boom, the average has been around 35k.
The data suggests that the UK’s finance sector has spun its wheels for two and a half decades. Things are different in the USA; over there, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) found that vacancies can grow.
At the start of 2001, JOLTS found that the US had around 240k postings in the finance & insurance industry. In July 2026, JOLTS found 300k openings.
For the table below, the ONS's headline vacancy figures are three-month averages rather than single-month counts. Each figure below covers the three months ending in the month shown, so "June 2021" is the average of April, May and June 2021. The chart is therefore a three-month rolling average of seasonally adjusted vacancies in the finance and insurance sector.
What's wrong with UK financial services jobs? Brexit might have something to do with it. So too might the lackluster British economy and banks' growing tendency to swap AI deployment for new hires. Equally, though, maybe there's nothing with British banking jobs. This is normal. It's just the boom period after the pandemic that was an aberration.
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