80% Of New UK Payroll Jobs Since 2014 Went To Foreign Nationals, Think Tank Finds

Just one in five of the roughly 3.7 million jobs added to UK payrolls from 2014 through the end of 2025 went to British nationals. Non-EU nationals took about 2.5 million of them, roughly two-thirds, and EU nationals another 408,000, leaving Britons with 734,000, according to a Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) analysis of HMRC data.

The center-right think tank released the figures Tuesday in State of Dependency, a 250-page report launching its Welfare 2030 inquiry. Former Work and Pensions Secretary Sir Iain Duncan Smith chairs the inquiry.

The CSJ’s rounded components add to about 3.64 million against its “approximately 3.7 million” total, so foreign nationals took close to 80% of the growth and Britons about 20%. Britons still hold most of the jobs that exist: HMRC data show 25.6 million Britons among 32 million payrolled workers in December 2025, the Press Association reported.

The shift is recent. Since January 2020, Britons’ payroll jobs fell in nine of the UK’s 12 regions and nations while non-EU nationals’ jobs rose in all 12, the CSJ’s regional table shows. Summed across that table, non-EU nationals gained about 2.1 million payroll jobs, Britons lost about 186,000 and EU nationals lost about 352,000. More than four-fifths of the non-EU gain since 2014 therefore came in the last six years of the twelve.

London shows it most sharply. Non-EU payroll jobs there rose by 465,200 since 2020 while Britons’ fell by 26,500 and EU nationals’ by 171,100. Scotland lost 53,000 British payroll jobs and gained 130,200 non-EU ones; the South East lost 31,700 and gained 284,500. Four sectors account for about two-thirds of the non-EU increase: health and social work (29%), administrative and support services (16%), accommodation and food (12%), and wholesale and retail (10%).

Care shows how the door opened. In the year to March 2023, about 57,700 care and senior care workers received skilled-worker visas, and 99% of sponsored care workers in 2022 came from outside the EU, according to the Migration Observatory. Inflows have since fallen: the ONS put net migration at 171,000 in 2025, from 331,000 a year earlier, with work-related arrivals of non-EU nationals down 47% to about 146,000 after rule changes that included closing the Health and Care route for overseas care workers. The CSJ’s payroll window ends in December 2025, so it captures the hiring wave and only part of the 2024 and 2025 restrictions.

The other half of the CSJ’s case is welfare. It counts 6.7 million people on at least one out-of-work benefit, about one in six working-age adults, and says out-of-work claimants rose by 2.3 million between February 2020 and November 2025. Working-age benefits are forecast to cost £136.1 billion in 2026/27, up about £50 billion in real terms since 2019/20, and the report identifies 3,369 “welfare hotspots” where claimants outnumber half the working-age population, home to nearly 900,000 people.

A companion CSJ estimate puts the foreign-national share at about 1.85 million non-British adults receiving at least one benefit or the state pension in 2025, at roughly £23 billion, including 1.3 million on Universal Credit at £11.9 billion. Those are CSJ calculations from DWP, HMRC and Home Office data and survey rates, not official statistics, and they assume half the adults in mixed-nationality households are foreign nationals. Earlier estimates ran lower: as we reported, one analysis of government data put welfare paid to migrants at £7.6 billion in a single year.

The report’s thesis is that governments swapped one dependency for another. Real GDP grew 26% from 2006 to 2025, but real GDP per person grew only 10%, which the CSJ calls “human quantitative easing”: importing workers to lift headline growth. It adds that official fiscal forecasts run only five years, so they bank the early tax take from migrant workers and miss the welfare costs that arrive later. Duncan Smith said “ministers have repeatedly pulled the easy lever of immigration rather than providing a better deal for left behind communities.”

He has made the jobs argument before. As work and pensions secretary in July 2011, Duncan Smith told a Madrid audience that businesses should hire unemployed Britons, and Channel 4 noted that 87% of the 400,000 jobs created in the coalition’s first year had gone to workers from abroad, a figure unearthed by Labour MP Frank Field. The same caution applies here. The CSJ counts net changes in payrolled jobs by nationality, not who was hired, and a naturalized citizen counts as British. In 2015 the Daily Express claimed 75% of new jobs went to EU migrants; the paper corrected it after economist Jonathan Portes complained and the press regulator IPSO ruled it “significantly misleading,” because the ONS data showed net changes in employment, not people entering new jobs.

The report landed a day after Reform UK’s Nigel Farage pledged to suspend the asylum system for a full parliament, as we reported.