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Households and their work status

Work status of London households (2004-2022)

What does this indicator show?

A household is considered “workless” when at least one member of the household is aged between 16 and 64 and none of its adults are in employment. This indicator shows the proportion of households in London where no adults are in work, and the proportion where some or all adults are in work.

What does it tell us?

In 8% of London’s working age households, no adults are in work. That's 501,000 households across the city. The proportion of workless households has almost halved since 2004 when 15% of households contained nobody in employment. There was a slight increase to 9% in 2021 likely as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, before returning to 8% in 2022. This means that in 2022, at least one adult does some work in 92% of working-age households in London.

In 2022, there were over 3.2 million households in London (53%) where all adults were in work and another 2.3 million households in London (39%) that contained some working adults.

Want to know more?

If you want to explore this data in more depth, check the 'data source and notes' button on the above charts. This will tell you where the data comes from, where you may be able to dig deeper.