Upward mobility? Earnings trajectories for recent immigrants

by Ben Brindle, Madeleine Sumption & Jonathan Portes

This analysis uses new data from HMRC to show how the size and earnings of the migrant employee workforce have changed over time in recent years. It has been updated since publication using data to December 2025.

Background and broader trends

Large shifts in migration have taken place over the past decade, driven both by migration policy and developments in the labour market more generally. From 2014, the number of jobs held by EU-origin employees grew sharply after transitional controls restricting free movement with Bulgaria and Romania were lifted. This growth slowed after the Brexit referendum, before the pandemic led to a significant reduction in the number of EU resident workers.

In January 2021, the introduction of the post-Brexit immigration system ended free movement while liberalising migration for work from outside the EU. Non-EU migration grew sharply between 2021 and 2023, particularly in the health and care sector after care workers were made eligible for Skilled Worker visas in early 2022. However, non-EU migration slowed sharply in 2024, as some of the temporary factors that boosted migration after the pandemic receded, and new restrictions introduced by the Conservative government reduced both student and care worker migration, and has fallen further in 2025. These developments are summarised in Portes (2025) and Sumption, Brindle and Walsh (2026).

Figure 1, below, shows the impact of this on the size of the workforce as a whole: the number of non-EU origin employees has more than doubled  to 4.2 million, accounting for all net labour force growth since the pre-pandemic period.

Figure 1

However, these overall numbers reflect movements both in and out of the UK labour market. Freedom of Information (FOI) data from HMRC allows us to identify new entrants to the employee workforce in each year. Figure 2 shows the very sharp post-pandemic rise in new entrants from outside the EU in the post-pandemic period, with more than 1.2 million in 2022 and 2023 alone. The number of new entrants fell back from its peak in 2023, at over 600,000, to around 400,000 in 2025, but remained at historically very high levels.

Figure 2

While the number of work visas rose sharply during this period, this only accounts for part of these numbers – for example, about 145,000 skilled work visas were issued to non-EU main applicants in 2025. The remainder will include international students, the dependants of people arriving on student and work visas, humanitarian arrivals from Ukraine and Hong Kong, as well as people who moved to the UK in earlier years but had not worked before.

Meanwhile, the number of EU workers appearing on payrolls for the first time fell steadily towards the end of the 2010s and then more sharply during the pandemic. In 2025, the number of new EU employees was almost 90% lower than in 2015, at about 45,000. This is not necessarily an indication of the level of new arrivals to the UK, as the number will include people who have the right to reside and work in the UK under the EU Settlement Scheme but had not previously worked as employees (e.g. people who were students, had caring responsibilities, or were self-employed).

Attrition from the employee workforce

The HMRC data provide crucial insights, not available from any other data source, into how long migrants remain in the employee workforce over time, because we can track how many people who first appeared in, say, 2015 were still in the dataset a few years later. If people disappear from the dataset, it will not always mean they have left the UK: some will have stopped working, for example, to care for children, or become unemployed or moved to self-employment, although return migration is likely to be the major reason over the longer term.

Of the EU-origin migrants who first appeared in 2015, 45% were still on payroll in 2025 (Figure 3). For non-EU origin migrants, the figure was 60%. While this difference is significant and confirms that non-EU migrants are somewhat more likely to remain permanently, it also shows that both groups contain large elements of both temporary and permanent migration. For established workers—that is, those who first appeared in the dataset in 2014 or earlier—attrition rates were lower, with 56% of EU-origin workers and 69% of non-EU-origin workers still in the data in 2025.

Attrition rates are considerably lower among non-EU employees who entered the workforce between 2020 and 2024, reflecting the change in non-EU migration patterns post-Brexit. In other words, non-EU employees became more likely to stay in the employee workforce in this period. The sharp increase in the number of people coming to work in the health and care sector is one likely reason. In addition, international students have been more likely to stay in the UK after their studies. This owes to the introduction of the post-study ‘Graduate Visa’ in 2021 and the post-Brexit liberalisation of work visas, which made it easier for former students to switch directly to work visas. For more information, see the Migration Observatory commentary, International students entering the UK labour market.

Figure 3

Earnings of new entrants to the employee workforce

The HMRC data also provide information on migrants’ earnings and how their distribution has changed over time. As noted above, the end of free movement and the introduction of the post-Brexit immigration system has changed the composition of people coming to the UK. This will also affect the earnings of new arrivals. For example, the new immigration system requires EU workers to meet salary requirements, while free movement did not. On the other hand, skilled EU workers who are eligible for work visas under the post-Brexit immigration system might find the UK less attractive due to Brexit or the end of free movement.

For non-EU workers, the sharp increase in the number of people coming to the UK after Brexit could, in theory, result in either higher or lower earnings among new entrants. The non-EU origin group includes larger numbers of skilled workers than in the past. However, the Skilled Worker salary threshold was significantly lower between 2021 and 2023 than before Brexit, particularly for care workers, who were added to the route in February 2022. In addition, many people arrived on other visas with no earnings criteria (such as Ukrainians or international students working part-time during their studies); and dependants of those on work and study visas can work in any job. There was a large increase in the number of asylum seekers granted refugee status in the UK, particularly in 2023. Finally, the Graduate Visa allows international students to work in any job for two years after completing their studies. The expansion of the non-EU origin workforce has occurred across a number of sectors, including some where work visas are unlikely to be the main factor.

How then has the post-Brexit immigration system affected the skills and thus earnings profile of non-UK labour market entrants? If we look at median earnings in the year of entry, each newly arriving cohort of non-EU citizens earned progressively more (compared to the UK workforce median) between 2015 and 2019 (Figure 4). Entry-year earnings then settled at a lower level between 2020 and 2023, followed by a modest decline in 2024 and a much sharper fall in 2025. By contrast, earnings for new cohorts of EU-origin workers were marginally higher than before Brexit.

If we look at migrants at the end of the first full year of employment (i.e., after removing those who spend only a short time in the UK employee workforce), relative median earnings improve for each successive non-EU cohort from 2015 to 2021. For the most recent, very large cohorts, we see surprising stability: after one full year in the UK labour market, each cohort from 2021 to 2023 was earning around 95% of the UK average, broadly similar to the pre-Brexit cohorts. However, there was a significant fall for those who arrived in 2024, to 90%. Relative earnings in the second full year of employment follow a similar pattern, but with median earnings for the 2021 to 2023 cohorts higher than those of the overall workforce.

Meanwhile, EU-origin migrants have gradually improved their relative position, although the improvement is not dramatic, despite the fact that immigration rules for EU workers became much more selective.

Figure 4

For non-EU migrants, then, we have an interesting and arguably counterintuitive picture. Those who entered the employee workforce during the very large surge in migration between 2021 and 2023 appear to have broadly similar (and perhaps slightly higher) earnings compared to people entering before Brexit. However, since 2024, as eligibility for work visas (and to some extent study visas) has been tightened, and numbers have fallen dramatically, relative earnings appear to have fallen back significantly. This suggests that, from an economic perspective, median earnings appear to have been higher when the work and study visa system was less selective.

This apparent paradox may reflect the fact that while the restrictions introduced in 2024 and 2025 made the work visa system more selective (by increasing salary thresholds and reducing eligible occupations), they also meant that lower-earning, non-selective routes such as refugees and family members of British citizens made up a higher share of newcomers. The number of Health & Care dependants who have below-average earnings also remained surprisingly high after the 2024 restrictions. By contrast, the workers most affected by the restrictions were predominantly in the middle and upper-middle range of the earnings distribution of new entrants overall. So, overall, the composition of migrant new entrants has become less favourable despite a more selective work-visa system.

It is, however, important to note that not everyone on non-selective routes has low earnings. For example, Skilled Worker dependants granted a visa in the year ending March 2024 had median annual earnings of £30,200, broadly in line with median earnings for the overall workforce.

There are some important caveats to this data. It includes both full-time and part-time workers, and we cannot distinguish between the two because hours worked are not reported. Recently arriving migrants may have been more likely to work full-time than others in the workforce, while international students who work will generally have low earnings because they are not permitted to work more than 20 hours a week. And the data is limited to those on payrolls, so does not include self-employment.  There is certainly anecdotal evidence that substantial numbers of recent migrants are in relatively low-paid self-employment (notably delivery jobs in the “gig economy”). If the size of the migrant gig-economy workforce has increased significantly (and this is not known), the impact on earnings will not be reflected in our data—although the numbers are likely to be much smaller compared to the large number of employees in our data. Finally, note that the figures above do not tell us whether the average new entrant was fiscally positive, neutral or negative before or after the policy changes.

New entrants’ earnings progression over time

The HMRC data allows us to look at earnings trajectories over time for the same cohort of migrants. A key caveat to all of the analysis is that because many migrants leave the employee workforce (as shown above), changes in average earnings over time may partly reflect changes in the composition of the workforce due to emigration.

On the one hand, some theories of migrant self-selection suggest that migrants who succeed in the labour market are less likely to emigrate; however, some studies find the opposite, particularly for highly skilled workers, who may simply be more mobile. For example, there is evidence that out-migration of EU workers since 2019 has been particularly marked in relatively low-paid sectors like accommodation and hospitality, which might bias estimates of earnings growth for EU-origin workers upwards. However, this is less obviously the case for non-EU origin workers. Existing data suggests that migrants who come to the UK from outside the EU for family reasons or to claim asylum both have much lower earnings and are much less likely to leave, while most work migrants leave within a few years.

How do the average earnings of newly arriving migrants change over time? Figure 5 shows the median earnings for those entering the labour market in a given year, relative to the median earnings of the entire workforce in that year.

Figure 5

The data suggest that non-EU origin employees’ median earnings have progressed somewhat faster over time. For example, while 2015 non-EU entrants took around six years to reach the overall median wage, 2021 entrants had already exceeded it after two years. Indeed, even those who entered in 2023 exceeded overall median earnings after two years. This implies that either more recent non-EU arrivals were seeing strong earnings growth relative to the overall workforce, or that lower earners were disproportionately leaving the employee workforce within the first few years (for example, international students working part-time before leaving the country), or some combination of the two. It is, of course, too early to say much about earnings progression for those who arrived since the tightening of policy in 2024 and 2025.

Meanwhile, EU-origin workers who first entered the labour market between 2021 and 2023 appear to earn more, relative to the median wage, than earlier cohorts, but their earnings growth is weaker than their non-EU counterparts.

While more recent non-EU cohorts’ average earnings have risen faster over time, the relative earnings of non-EU employees overall fell between 2021 and 2023 (Figure 6). How can the two be squared? Whereas the progression data look at each cohort separately, the overall picture depends on the size of each cohort. In other words, since non-EU migrants earn considerably less when they first enter the labour market, the overall earnings of non-EU employees will be lower when there are more new entrants, as was the case between 2022 and 2024 (see Figure 2). This is a compositional effect. As the number of new entrants has declined in the last two years, this effect has faded, and the earnings of non-EU employees overall have therefore increased relative to the overall median in 2025—even though new entrants that year had lower median earnings.

Figure 6

Employment rates

Since it does not cover those outside the employee workforce, our data does not directly tell us anything about employment rates (and hence about the overall fiscal impact of recent migration). The limited available evidence suggests that employment rates for those on non-work visas vary widely by immigration category, with asylum migrants and partners of British citizens and settled residents less likely to be in work.

Between 2021 and 2025, total net non-EU migration was estimated at approximately 3.4 million, of whom 80 to 85% are likely to be of working age—as of December 2025, just over 2 million of those in the employee workforce were non-EU migrants who had joined the workforce since 2021.  For the reasons set out above, these figures are not directly comparable, although they do suggest that employment rates among recent migrants are not far off existing residents or long-standing migrants. The limited evidence we have from the Labour Force Survey is consistent with this.

Conclusion

The analysis presented above is based on aggregate data only – we follow groups whose composition changes over time and do not have information on important factors which impact earnings, such as gender and age, nor on hours worked or self-employment. Nevertheless, the data covers more than 30 million employees and tells us a considerable amount about the more than 2 million non-EU origin migrant workers who have entered the UK labour market since the pandemic. Our key findings are:

• Substantial shares of migrants leave the UK’s employee workforce within the first few years, and this was particularly the case among EU workers who started working in the UK under free movement. More recent migrants, especially from outside the EU, seem more likely to remain.
• Non-EU migrants who entered in 2021-23 appear to have broadly similar (and perhaps slightly higher) earnings compared to people entering before Brexit. However, since 2024, relative earnings of migrants newly entering the labour market appear to have fallen back significantly. This may reflect the fact that while the restrictions introduced in 2024 and 2025 made the work visa system more selective, the smaller numbers of work visa holders meant that lower-earning groups of migrants, such as refugees, family of British citizens, and Health & Care dependants, made up a higher share of the total. Those affected by the restrictions were still predominantly in the middle and upper-middle range of the earnings distribution of new entrants overall.

• EU-origin entrants after 2021 earned more than previous cohorts. However, earnings growth has generally been slower than for non-EU citizens who started working in the same year, even though both groups now face the same migration rules.

• Earnings progression among the very large cohorts of new non-EU entrants in 2021 to 2023 appears to have been faster than for those who arrived in the pre-pandemic period, with those who arrived between 2021 and 2023 already seeing average earnings higher than the national average. It is too early to assess the earnings progression of those arriving in 2024 and afterwards.

The migration system has changed dramatically since 2020, and further changes are still in progress.  And for many of those in the data, this is still very early: we are observing the first few years of earnings trajectories, which in many cases have some decades left to run. Much will depend on the composition of employees who stay in the UK, but also on labour market developments in the sectors in which they are concentrated.

 

Underlying data – HMRC RTI earnings by nationality (2026)