Report: Low Pay Britain 2018

The eighth annual review of pay data from the Resolution Foundation reveals that the number of employees in low pay is falling, but new challenges are emerging.

Key findings:

• The National Living Wage (NLW) led to another drop in low pay in 2017, with 18 per cent of employees earning less than two-thirds of the median hourly wage, equivalent to 4.9 million people.
• This pattern of declining numbers in low pay is set to continue up to 2020. However, even when the NLW is fully implemented, approximately four million people will still be on low pay.
• More than one in five workers were paid less than the voluntary Living Wage in 2017, with seven per cent of employees paid at the wage floor.
• There are three challenges ahead for policy makers to help more people out of low-paid roles: improving workplace progression, the domination of large companies in certain sectors keeping pay low, and closing the gender pay gap.

The report is based on pay data from April 2017.