East Midlands · Baseline population 323,600
Official ONS figures for the region Nottingham 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 Nottingham-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. East Midlands ranks 5 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
110,430 people in East Midlands were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 4.5% of economically active residents, up 2,990 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 24,640, up 2,345 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
2,209,865 people were on a payroll in East Midlands in September 2026, down 2,014 (0.09%) 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 Nottingham events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to Nottingham.
| 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.
Nottingham sits in the middle of almost every metric — mid-table score, mid-sized city, mid-range across all sectors. Health at 11.2%, education at 10.4%, admin at 10.2%, and retail at 9.8% create a profile that's neither dramatically vulnerable nor comfortably safe. The two universities (Nottingham and Nottingham Trent) are significant employers and talent producers, and the BioCity incubator has created a genuine life sciences cluster. Financial services at 8.2% adds specific AI vulnerability through the insurance and banking back-offices. Nottingham's challenge is that its strengths are real but diffuse — there's no single dominant asset like Sheffield's AMRC or Bristol's aerospace corridor to anchor a transition strategy around. The city needs to make its breadth a deliberate strategy rather than a default position.
Nottingham has two universities, a hospital, and a lot of people working in shops. Two of those are AI-resistant. Guess which ones. The city has been 'on the verge of something' for roughly two decades — the tram was supposed to transform it, the Broadmarsh was supposed to revitalise it, the creative quarter was supposed to define it, and in the end Nottingham remains a mid-table city with mid-table ambitions wrapped in the remnants of a Robin Hood marketing campaign that makes everyone wince. The Broadmarsh saga — demolished, debated, still a hole in the ground — is the most honest piece of urban planning in England: a physical gap where the aspiration used to be. BioCity is genuine and employs about 200 people, which in strategy documents sounds like an ecosystem and in practice sounds like two floors of labs. Boots was founded here, which the council mentions at every opportunity despite the fact that Walgreens Boots Alliance is now an American company that views Beeston as a cost centre. Retail at 9.8%, admin at 10.2% — the sectors that actually employ most people in Nottingham are the ones that AI is specifically designed to shrink. The universities keep producing graduates. The graduates keep leaving. Nottingham keeps wondering why.
The Boots pharmaceutical heritage should be actively leveraged to build a health-tech and life sciences cluster — partner with BioCity, the university, and the NHS Trust on AI-driven drug discovery, health data analytics, and clinical AI applications. NTU's strength in applied and practice-based courses should be channelled into AI operations, data annotation, and technical skills that serve the regional economy. The Broadmarsh redevelopment is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the city centre — prioritise creative workspace, tech offices, and community infrastructure over retail. The financial services workers need proactive retraining before Capital One and Experian automate their Nottingham operations. The creative economy in Hockley and Sneinton is small but genuine; protect it with affordable workspace guarantees and business rate relief.
They'll spend another decade arguing about what to do with the Broadmarsh site, hold public consultations that produce contradictory preferences, and eventually build something mediocre that satisfies nobody and employs fewer people than the shopping centre it replaced. BioCity will be name-dropped in every economic development document while remaining approximately the same size it's been for a decade. Someone will propose a 'Nottingham Digital Campus' in the Lace Market that attracts a fintech startup and a co-working brand. Capital One will automate its Nottingham operations over five years in increments too small to trigger local outrage. Boots will maintain its Beeston site because moving is expensive, not because of any loyalty to Nottingham, and the headcount will drift downward with each reorganisation. The universities will produce two competing AI strategies that duplicate each other's work and compete for the same funding. Hockley will continue gentrifying. Sneinton will continue being described as 'up and coming,' which it has been since roughly 2008. The tram will get another extension. The hole where the Broadmarsh used to be will become a metaphor that nobody intended.
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 | 11.2% | 0.18 | low | 2.02 |
| Education | 10.4% | 0.15 | low | 1.56 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 10.2% | 0.85 | high | 8.67 |
| Retail | 9.8% | 0.8 | high | 7.84 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 8.2% | 0.75 | high | 6.15 |
| Manufacturing | 7.4% | 0.82 | high | 6.07 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 6.8% | 0.48 | medium | 3.26 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 6.4% | 0.3 | low | 1.92 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 5.8% | 0.22 | low | 1.28 |
| Transport & Storage | 5.6% | 0.78 | high | 4.37 |
| Construction | 4.8% | 0.28 | low | 1.34 |
| Information & Communication | 4.8% | 0.5 | medium | 2.4 |
| Wholesale | 4.2% | 0.55 | medium | 2.31 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 3.1% | 0.2 | low | 0.62 |
| Real Estate | 1.1% | 0.4 | medium | 0.44 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.2% | 0.25 | low | 0.05 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of Nottingham'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 70.7 means Nottingham's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 70.7% probability of displacement.