200,000 Jobs Have Gone Since 2024. Here’s Who’s Losing Them and Why

One decision in your budget could be the difference between riding this out and getting caught by it.

This is for you if you’re employed and want to know how exposed you actually are, if you’re job hunting right now, or if you’re just starting out in retail or hospitality and wondering why it feels harder than it used to.

Over 200,000 jobs have disappeared from UK payrolls since 2024. Businesses doing the cutting point to two things above all else: employer National Insurance going up, and the minimum wage going up.

What’s actually happened

Employer National Insurance is a tax businesses pay on top of your salary, separate from anything that comes out of your own payslip. When it rises, you cost more to employ even though your pay hasn’t changed. The minimum wage is the legal floor on hourly pay.

When it goes up, so does the cost of every hour worked near that floor.

Employer National Insurance doesn’t touch your take-home pay directly, it’s a separate cost the business pays on top. The minimum wage is different: if you’re on or near it, a rise there does lift your pay. But it also raises the cost of employing you, which is the part driving some of the hiring pullback in retail and hospitality.

Retailers have cut around 18,000 jobs this year, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, John Lewis, Kingfisher, Next and JD Sports among them. Hospitality has taken more than half of all the job losses since the tax changes landed, roughly 90,000 roles out of 165,000.

The British Retail Consortium puts the added cost from these two changes at £6.5 billion over two years, and says it has cost the sector 122,000 jobs in that time.

Who’s most exposed

This isn’t spread evenly. The sectors taking the hit are retail, hospitality, and other tight-margin businesses where staff costs are a huge share of total spending.

Younger workers and people in their first job are disproportionately affected, because those are exactly the roles concentrated in those sectors. If you’re in tech, professional services, or healthcare, the picture looks very different, those sectors haven’t seen anything like the same squeeze.

Does this mean more people on benefits?

Not automatically, and this is worth knowing. The most recent claimant count was actually down slightly year on year. That doesn’t mean the picture is fine, it means people losing jobs aren’t moving straight onto Universal Credit in a clean one-to-one way.

Some are leaving the workforce, switching sectors, or living off savings or a partner’s income in ways that never show up as a single tidy number.

What I’d actually do about it

If you’re employed, don’t assume you’re safe just because nothing has happened yet. Know your redundancy rights before you need them, not after. Keep your CV current even if you have no intention of using it this year, it costs nothing and means you’re not starting from zero if things move quickly.

If you’re job hunting, be honest about where the pressure is concentrated. Retail and hospitality are harder than they were eighteen months ago. That doesn’t mean don’t apply, it means go in with your eyes open and keep other options moving too.

And if you don’t have some kind of cash buffer, even a small one, this is a decent time to start one. Even a month of expenses saved is the difference between job hunting properly and taking the first thing offered out of panic.

My parting thoughts

The people making these tax and wage decisions are trying to fix real problems, funding public services, raising pay at the bottom. The people absorbing the cost of that are, very often, the exact people those policies were meant to help.

I don’t think there’s a neat answer to that. I just think it’s worth saying plainly rather than only repeating whichever half of the story suits whoever’s talking.

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This article is for general information only and doesn’t constitute personal financial advice. Everyone’s circumstances are different, and if you want to talk through what this means for your own situation, it’s worth speaking to a regulated financial adviser.

Sources: Bloomberg, “UK’s Top Retailers Cut 18,000 Jobs Since Labour’s Tax Rises,” 5 June 2026; British Retail Consortium, via reporting on employer National Insurance and National Living Wage cost increases; UKHospitality, sector job loss figures; House of Commons Library / ONS, Claimant Count, July 2026.

*Updated 16/9/2026 14:52