Scotland · Baseline population 635,130
Official ONS figures for the region Glasgow sits in, published June to August 2026. These are measured statistics, separate from the structural exposure score above — they are reported here as context and are not an input to it. Region-level data is the finest geography ONS publishes monthly; it is not a Glasgow-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. Scotland ranks 7 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
108,760 people in Scotland were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 3.9% of economically active residents, up 7,630 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 22,920, up 3,075 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
2,445,914 people were on a payroll in Scotland in September 2026, down 3,726 (0.15%) on the year, against 0.22% down across the UK as a whole. This is an administrative count of actual payroll records, not a survey estimate. The most recent month is a provisional flash estimate and is routinely revised.
The two UK-wide measures of employees disagree. On ONS's own like-for-like
comparison, HMRC payroll (RTI) records show payrolled employees
down 92,000 over the
year and down
37,000 over the quarter in
June to August 2026. Over the same period the Labour Force Survey shows employees
up 314,000 to
29.9 million. The provisional September
flash estimate puts payrolled employees at
30.3 million, down
66,000 on the year.
ONS attributes part of the LFS employee increase to improvements in the survey since January 2024, which have obtained more responses from employed people. Levels have therefore moved closer to RTI, but ONS cautions that LFS measures of change 'may be less aligned with RTI because they capture both real labour market shifts and changes arising from the survey improvements'. The divergence is concentrated in the 25 to 34 year old age group, which ONS is still investigating.
ONS's view remains that RTI 'currently provides the most reliable measure of employees'. As of the October 2026 release this statement appears in the LFS quality update rather than in the labour market overview bulletin itself.
We surface both rather than quietly picking one.
The August 2026 flash estimate reported a fall of 145,000 on the year; the confirmed figure is 111,000. Flash estimates are provisional and are routinely revised when more data arrive, so the September flash of -66,000 should be read as the least settled number here.
ONS research linking RTI
to the LFS, published 28 September 2026:
Linked HMRC PAYE data showed a stronger recovery in employment after the pandemic and a smaller, less prolonged rise in economic inactivity than the published LFS estimates alone suggested. It also suggested the LFS recovery during 2024 and 2025 may have reduced non-response bias, since using the linked payroll data made only a small difference to the level of employment and inactivity estimates in 2025. ONS describes the work as exploratory and is continuing the analysis.
The survey side is UK-wide; ONS publishes no regional split of this comparison. The payroll side is parsed from the ONS reference table (rtisaoct2026.xlsx). Source: ONS Labour market overview, UK: October 2026, released 20 October 2026. Next release 17 November 2026.
Sources. ONS Labour market overview, UK (time series API); ONS Labour market in the regions of the UK (Table 2, annual changes); ONS Annual Population Survey, via NOMIS (variables, percentages); Claimant count by sex and age (Universal Credit + JSA), ONS/DWP via NOMIS; Earnings and employment from PAYE Real Time Information, seasonally adjusted (Table 7, payrolled employees by NUTS1 region). Retrieved 2026-10-22. LFS and APS outputs moved from “official statistics in development” to “official statistics” on 11 August 2026 and ONS is not seeking reaccreditation; survey-based detail should be read with that in mind. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Reported UK redundancy events from the CopeCheck Layoffs tracker. These are UK-wide, not Glasgow events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Glasgow.
| Reported | Company | Roles | Sector | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08 | University of Essex | 400 | Education | www.bbc.co.uk |
| 2026-08 | Nothing | 100 | Technology | Google Alerts RSS |
| 2026-08 | Travelport | 57 | Technology | Google Alerts RSS |
| 2026-08 | TSB | 130 | Banking | bmmagazine.co.uk |
| 2026-08 | Diageo | 38 | Food & Beverage | drinks-intel.com |
| 2026-08 | WPP | 1,267 | Advertising | gbnews.com |
| 2026-08 | Supermassive Games | 75 | Technology | Google Alerts RSS |
| 2026-08 | RNLI | 75 | Charity/Non-profit | Google Alerts RSS |
74 UK events recorded for 2026, of which 11 are attributed by their source at least partly to AI or automation. Counts are individual reported events, not a national total. The upstream tracker withholds aggregates because source claims may be syndicated, aggregate, planned, aliased or overlapping. These are UK-wide and are not attributed to this city. Compiled from layoffs.fyi, TrueUp, Crunchbase, TechCrunch, and news reports. Snapshot taken 2026-10-22.
Model-generated scenario commentary, not reported fact. Specific claims about future employer or council behaviour are hypothetical; use the sector table, not the prose, as the reproducible input to the score.
Glasgow's post-industrial reinvention has been more successful than it gets credit for — health at 12.4%, education at 10.2%, and a growing creative economy in gaming, film, and design create meaningful automation resistance. Financial services at 7.8% and admin at 9.8% represent specific vulnerabilities, but at levels below many comparably sized cities. The city's four universities provide an extraordinary research and talent base for a city of its size, and the cultural infrastructure (SEC, theatres, galleries, music venues) is genuinely world-class. Glasgow's challenge has always been translating its cultural energy and institutional strength into broad economic prosperity — the city has the assets of a powerhouse and the deprivation statistics of a warning. AI displacement will exacerbate that gap unless the transition is actively managed.
Glasgow survived deindustrialisation through sheer bloody-mindedness and is planning the same approach to AI, which is at least consistent. The NHS employing 12.4% of the city is simultaneously a safety net and a damning indictment of what happens when nothing else works — Glasgow's health employment is high partly because Glasgow's health outcomes are terrible, which creates a grim economic flywheel that nobody wants to model. The city has four universities, which between them produce enough graduates to fill every tech company in Scotland, and those graduates duly leave for Edinburgh, London, and California. Buchanan Street is doing fine. Sauchiehall Street is doing that thing where it alternates between JD Sports and empty units, providing a real-time visualization of retail's future. The creative sector is real — Rockstar Games, BBC Scotland, an actual film industry — and employs roughly the same number of people as one NHS hospital, which tells you everything about the gap between cultural narrative and economic reality. Admin at 9.8%, financial services at 7.8% — the non-institutional economy is automatable in the same way it's automatable everywhere, just with better gallows humour. Glasgow's resilience is legendary, genuine, and shouldn't have to be tested this often.
Glasgow's creative economy needs to scale beyond cultural assets into economic engines: invest in game development studios, post-production facilities, and music technology that builds on Rockstar Games and the BBC Scotland hub. The four universities should coordinate a shared AI skills programme rather than competing with each other — the combined research capability is world-class and being fragmented by institutional rivalry. The health sector's dominance should be leveraged into a health-tech cluster: Glasgow's combination of clinical data, research hospitals, and health inequalities creates a unique testing ground for AI-driven health solutions. The Barras and Trongate creative district should receive the same investment and planning protection as the financial district — creative industries need affordable space, not just encouragement.
They'll rebrand the Clyde waterfront again — 'Innovation District,' 'Digital Corridor,' 'Clyde Gateway 2.0' — attract a few more gaming studios and a BBC Scotland extension, and continue depending on the NHS and the universities to employ a quarter of the city. Rockstar Games will continue being Glasgow's favourite economic success story, a company that employs about 600 people and is used to justify an entire 'creative economy' narrative. The universities will compete with each other for AI research funding, produce overlapping strategies, and collectively fail to retain their best graduates. Buchanan Galleries will get a 'reimagining' that takes a decade and produces mixed-use development that's perfectly adequate. Sauchiehall Street will continue its transformation from high street to art project. Someone will announce a 'Glasgow AI Cluster' at a conference attended by people from Edinburgh. The city will keep being resilient, which in practice means absorbing economic shocks without collapsing rather than thriving, and framing this as a character trait rather than a failure of strategy. Glasgow's economic development approach is basically 'be resilient and refuse to die,' and honestly, given the hand it's been dealt, you can't blame it.
Historical employment share by broad sector, with CopeCheck's heuristic exposure weight and contribution to the relative score. Higher weights contribute more; they are not probabilities.
| Sector | Employment % | Exposure Weight | Exposure Tier | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Human Health & Social Work | 12.4% | 0.18 | low | 2.23 |
| Education | 10.2% | 0.15 | low | 1.53 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 9.8% | 0.85 | high | 8.33 |
| Retail | 9.4% | 0.8 | high | 7.52 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 7.8% | 0.75 | high | 5.85 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 7.4% | 0.48 | medium | 3.55 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 7.2% | 0.22 | low | 1.58 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 6.8% | 0.3 | low | 2.04 |
| Manufacturing | 5.6% | 0.82 | high | 4.59 |
| Construction | 5.4% | 0.28 | low | 1.51 |
| Transport & Storage | 5.2% | 0.78 | high | 4.06 |
| Information & Communication | 5.2% | 0.5 | medium | 2.6 |
| Wholesale | 3.6% | 0.55 | medium | 1.98 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 2.7% | 0.2 | low | 0.54 |
| Real Estate | 1.2% | 0.4 | medium | 0.48 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.1% | 0.25 | low | 0.03 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Glasgow's sector employment shares. Each broad sector carries a CopeCheck heuristic exposure weight (0.0–1.0). Frey & Osborne's study estimated occupation-level susceptibility; it did not publish these sector weights. The bundled city files also lack record-level source dates and ledgers, so this is a historical structural comparison rather than an official current statistic. The weighted average is normalised to a 0–100 scale. A score of 66.1 means Glasgow's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 66.1% probability of displacement.