Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE)

The Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is a statutory survey conducted under the Statistics of Trade Act 1947. ASHE is a detailed and comprehensive source of national information on the levels of earnings, the makeup of total earnings, the distribution of the earnings of individual employee's averages and distributions of hours worked and pension type. It is completed for employees in all industries and occupations.

The ASHE volumes contain UK data on earnings for employees by sex and full-time or part-time workers. Further breakdowns include by region, occupation, industry, region by occupation, and age-groups for variables including gross weekly pay, gross hourly pay, weekly pay excluding overtime, hourly pay excluding overtime, overtime pay, gross hours worked and overtime hours worked.

In 2004, ASHE replaced the New Earnings Survey (NES). The NES data for 2003 and earlier have been reworked using the ASHE imputation and weighting methodology in order to provide a continuous time series. However, the data does not take account of the improved coverage.