Four in five new UK payroll jobs since 2014 went to foreign nationals

Roughly 3.7 million jobs were added to British payrolls between 2014 and the end of 2025. British nationals fill about 734,000 of them — one in five. Non-EU nationals took around 2.5 million, EU nationals a further 408,000, according to a Centre for Social Justice analysis of HMRC data released Tuesday in a 250-page report, "State of Dependency."

Britons still hold most of the jobs that exist — 25.6 million of 32 million payrolled workers in December 2025 — but the growth went elsewhere. Since January 2020, payroll jobs held by non-EU nationals rose in all twelve UK regions and nations while British payroll employment fell in nine of them. London gained 465,200 non-EU payroll jobs over that period and lost 26,500 British ones; Scotland lost 53,000 British jobs and gained 130,200 non-EU ones. More than four-fifths of the non-EU job growth since 2014 came in the last six years.

Four sectors account for about two-thirds of the non-EU increase: health and social work (29 percent), administrative and support services, accommodation and food, and wholesale and retail. The care system led the intake — 57,700 care and senior care workers received skilled-worker visas in the year to March 2023, and the Migration Observatory counts 99 percent of sponsored care workers in 2022 as coming from outside the EU.

The report opens the think tank's "Welfare 2030" inquiry, chaired by former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, and counts 6.7 million working-age adults on at least one out-of-work benefit — one in six — after claimants rose by 2.3 million between February 2020 and November 2025. Working-age benefits are forecast to cost £136.1 billion in 2026/27, up about £50 billion in real terms since 2019/20. A companion CSJ calculation puts benefits and state pensions paid to non-British adults at roughly £23 billion a year, including 1.3 million foreign nationals on Universal Credit — a figure derived from DWP, HMRC and Home Office data and survey assumptions rather than official statistics, and far above the £7.6 billion an earlier single-year analysis of government data found.

The inflow is now slowing: the Office for National Statistics put net migration at 171,000 in 2025, down from 331,000 a year earlier, and work-related arrivals of non-EU nationals fell 47 percent after ministers closed the Health and Care route for overseas care workers. The payroll data ends in December 2025, so it measures the wave rather than the restrictions. The Daily Mail, citing official figures, reports that at least 200,000 people have nonetheless been granted the right to remain since Labour promised its migration crackdown.

Real GDP grew 26 percent between 2006 and 2025; per person it grew 10 percent. The CSJ calls the gap "human quantitative easing" — importing workers to lift the headline figure — and notes that official fiscal forecasts run only five years, long enough to bank a new worker's early tax payments, short enough to miss the pension and welfare costs that follow.

The report maps 3,369 neighbourhoods where benefit claimants make up more than half the working-age population. Nearly 900,000 people live in them.