The tool resolves the postcode to a Travel To Work Area (TTWA) or Local Authority District (LAD) — whichever ONS publishes the relevant statistic at — and pulls the latest available data.

Add a second postcode to put two towns side-by-side. Useful for relocation decisions where you are choosing between two jobs in different cities, or comparing your current home with a target area.

Choose 1–10 years. Default 5 years. Shorter windows highlight recent change; longer windows reveal structural trends. ONS series go back to 2004 for most metrics.

The hero panel shows employment rate, median full-time earnings (residence-based), unemployment rate (claimant count) and sector concentration HHI for each location, with deltas vs national average.

The sector chart shows the percentage of jobs in each ONS sector (manufacturing, retail, finance, public sector, etc.) compared to the national mix. Bars highlight where the town over- or under-indexes.

The occupations table lists the most common jobs by SOC code with employment count and median earnings. Sortable; useful for confirming whether your specific role exists locally and what it pays there.

All statistics are sourced from ONS NOMIS — the official labour market database — drawing on the Annual Population Survey (APS), the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) and the claimant count time series.

Data is published with a lag of 6–12 months. The tool always shows the most recent published vintage and the publication date. ONS updates are quarterly for most series.

Travel To Work Areas (TTWAs) are functional economic zones — areas where most residents commute internally. There are 228 TTWAs in the UK. They are the right geography for "is there a job market here" questions.

Local Authority Districts (LADs) are administrative units used for council data, council tax, school catchments. They are right for "what is the local government like" questions but can split a single labour market in two (e.g. Manchester city vs Trafford vs Stockport are one TTWA but separate LADs).

SOC (Standard Occupational Classification) codes are 4-digit job categories. SOC 2010 / SOC 2020 are used by ONS. Examples:

• SOC 2136 Programmers and software development professionals
• SOC 2231 Nurses
• SOC 6126 Educational support assistants
• SOC 9111 Farm workers

The tool shows employment count, percentage share, and median full-time earnings. Watch out for thin samples — occupations with fewer than 50 employees in a TTWA have wide confidence intervals on earnings and may not appear at all due to disclosure rules.

Two different unemployment measures are commonly used:

• ILO unemployment rate (from APS): people actively seeking work and available to start. This is the headline figure but is only published quarterly with a lag.
• Claimant count: people receiving Jobseeker's Allowance or out-of-work Universal Credit. Published monthly. Tends to be lower than ILO unemployment because not all unemployed people claim, but moves in similar direction.

For trend analysis the claimant count is preferred — it updates more frequently and is available at smaller geographies.

Beware:

• University towns: huge student population depresses employment rate even though jobs are plentiful.
• Commuter belts: residence-based earnings are very high (London commuters) but local jobs are low-paid.
• Tourism towns: workplace earnings are high in season but local resident earnings are low.
• Small samples: TTWAs with under 30,000 working-age population have wide confidence intervals.

The tool flags samples with confidence-interval warnings.