Yorkshire and the Humber · Baseline population 210,618
Official ONS figures for the region York 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 York-only figure.
UK average for the same period: unemployment 4.7%, employment 75.3%, inactivity 20.9%. Yorkshire and the Humber ranks 3 of 12 UK regions and countries by unemployment rate.
145,635 people in Yorkshire and the Humber were claiming unemployment-related benefits in September 2026, 5.3% of economically active residents, up 4,060 on September 2025. Among 16–24 year olds the count was 33,835, up 3,330 on the year. Not seasonally adjusted; this is an administrative count, not a survey estimate.
2,398,254 people were on a payroll in Yorkshire and the Humber in September 2026, down 7,956 (0.33%) on the year, against 0.22% down across the UK as a whole — Yorkshire and the Humber is shedding payrolled jobs faster than the national average. 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 York events — the tracker records the country a layoff was reported in, not the town or city, so nothing here is attributed to York.
| 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.
York's economy runs on a combination that's surprisingly well-suited to the AI era: education at 12.4%, health at 12.8%, and a heritage tourism sector that's inherently human. Together these anchor roughly a third of the workforce in sectors where physical presence, human judgement, and cultural authenticity matter — exactly the qualities that automation can't easily replicate. The University of York is a research-intensive institution that punches above its weight, and the city's quality of life attracts knowledge workers who could live anywhere. Admin at 8.8% and retail at 9.2% create some vulnerability, but at lower levels than most cities in the dataset. York's risk isn't AI displacement — it's complacency, the assumption that heritage and universities are enough without building the economic diversification that makes the next generation's prosperity possible.
Tourists want to see humans in Viking hats, not robots, and York has built an entire economy around this preference. Education at 12.4%, health at 12.8%, and a tourism sector that monetises medieval architecture at a per-square-metre rate that would make a London estate agent blush — it's a surprisingly robust formula for the AI age. The Shambles is the most visited street in Europe, mainly by people taking the same Instagram photo, and that foot traffic sustains an ecosystem of fudge shops, Harry Potter merchandise vendors, and ghost walk operators that AI simply cannot replace. The irony is that York's medieval economy is more future-proof than most modern ones. The university is excellent. The hospital is essential. The Minster is eternal. And the actual economic development beyond those three things is... well, there's a science park, and it's fine. York's ceiling is lower than it should be because the floor is so comfortable. Why diversify when you've got a cathedral and a chocolate factory museum? The answer, of course, is that cathedrals and chocolate museums don't employ 200,000 people, but that's a problem for someone else's strategy document.
York's quality of life and university strength make it naturally attractive to remote and hybrid workers in the tech and creative sectors — build on this deliberately with co-working infrastructure, fast broadband in the rural hinterland, and a housing strategy that doesn't price out the young professionals the city needs. The BioYorkshire initiative in agritech and bioeconomy is exactly the kind of knowledge-sector diversification the city should scale — the Vale of York is agricultural heartland, and the university has the research capability to connect farming with technology. York should also develop its data science and AI research presence: the city has the intellectual infrastructure to become a centre for AI ethics, digital humanities, and responsible technology, all of which are growth sectors that fit the city's character.
They'll keep the chocolate museum open, charge tourists £18 for a ghost walk, and hope that being picturesque is an economic strategy. And the maddening thing is: it sort of is. York will resist diversification because diversification requires risk, and York's entire economic model is based on being the opposite of risky — safe, beautiful, historic, and slightly boring after 9pm. The science park will grow at a pace that's 'encouraging' in strategy documents and 'negligible' in employment terms. BioYorkshire will produce some interesting research that gets implemented on farms owned by people who live in North Yorkshire and employ people from Eastern Europe. A 'York Digital' initiative will attract a few tech firms who come for the quality of life and stay for the... quality of life, because the commercial ecosystem is thin. The university will continue to be excellent and to produce graduates who move to Leeds for the salary or London for the career. York will remain the city equivalent of a comfortable retirement — pleasant, well-maintained, and not especially ambitious. The Minster will still be there in a hundred years. Whether the working-age economy will be equally permanent is a question York prefers not to ask.
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 | 12.8% | 0.18 | low | 2.3 |
| Education | 12.4% | 0.15 | low | 1.86 |
| Retail | 9.2% | 0.8 | high | 7.36 |
| Administrative & Support Services | 8.8% | 0.85 | high | 7.48 |
| Accommodation & Food Services | 8.4% | 0.48 | medium | 4.03 |
| Financial & Insurance Services | 7.2% | 0.75 | high | 5.4 |
| Public Administration & Defence | 6.8% | 0.22 | low | 1.5 |
| Professional, Scientific & Technical | 6.2% | 0.3 | low | 1.86 |
| Manufacturing | 5.4% | 0.82 | high | 4.43 |
| Information & Communication | 4.8% | 0.5 | medium | 2.4 |
| Transport & Storage | 4.6% | 0.78 | high | 3.59 |
| Construction | 4.2% | 0.28 | low | 1.18 |
| Arts, Entertainment & Recreation | 4.0% | 0.2 | low | 0.8 |
| Wholesale | 3.4% | 0.55 | medium | 1.87 |
| Real Estate | 1.2% | 0.4 | medium | 0.48 |
| Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing | 0.6% | 0.25 | low | 0.15 |
The vulnerability score is a weighted average of York'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 61.7 means York's workforce is significantly concentrated in higher-weighted sectors compared with other United Kingdom cities in this dataset; it does not state a 61.7% probability of displacement.