UK unemployment rate unexpectedly fell for the three months to March 2020

Office for National Statistics said, the UK unemployment rate for the three months to March 2020 was estimated at 3.9%, 0.1 percentage points higher than a year earlier and 0.1 percentage points higher than the previous quarter. Economists had expected an increase to 4.4%.

The UK employment rate in the three months to March 2020 was estimated at a joint-record high of 76.6%, 0.6 percentage points higher than a year earlier and 0.2 percentage points up on the previous quarter.

The total number of weekly hours worked in the three months to March 2020 was 1,040.6 million, 12.4 million hours less than the previous year.

In real terms (after adjusting for inflation), annual earnings growth was estimated to be 0.7% in total pay and 1.0% in regular pay, in the three months to March 2020, both down from a recent peak of 2.0% in the three months to June 2019.

There were an estimated 637,000 vacancies in the UK in February to April 2020; this is 170,000 fewer than the previous quarter and 210,000 fewer than a year earlier.

The number of paid employees in the UK in March 2020 grew by 0.4%, compared with the same period of the previous year.

Early estimates for April 2020 indicate that the number of paid employees fell by 1.2% compared with April 2019 and fell by 1.6% when compared with March 2020.

Median monthly pay grew by 2.7% in March 2020, compared with the same period of the previous year.

Early estimates for April 2020 indicate that median monthly pay fell by 0.9% compared with the same period of the previous year.