Working and workless households in the UK: October to December 2021

• Of the estimated 21.1 million households (where at least one member is aged 16 to 64 years) in the UK, 59.2% had all household members aged 16 years and over in employment during October to December 2021; up 1.2 percentage points compared with the same period last year.

• There was an estimated 26.9% of households with a mix of at least one working and one workless adult, down 1.1 percentage points compared with the same period last year.

• There was an estimated 13.8% of households where no member of the household was in employment, down 0.1 percentage points compared with the same period last year.

Labour Force Survey (LFS) household datasets are used for analysis of family or household characteristics. For all analysis in this bulletin, a household is defined as containing at least one person aged 16 to 64 years. This bulletin focuses on the economic status of household members, for example:

• number of people in employment in the household

• number of people unemployed in the household

• number of people economically inactive in the household

All estimates in this release are not seasonally adjusted and all comparisons should be carried out on an annual basis. For example, by comparing April to June periods with April to June periods or October to December periods with October to December periods of different years. Comparisons made in the datasets associated with this release are between the latest available period, October to December 2021, and October to December 2020.

LFS and APS reweighting

We plan to reweight LFS and Annual Population Survey (APS) datasets that include data from March 2020. We will provide further details on our plans including a timeline in our March labour market publication.

Coronavirus

For information on how labour market data sources are affected by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, see the article published on 6 May 2020, detailing some of the challenges that we have faced in producing estimates.

An article published on 11 December 2020 compares our labour market data sources and discusses some of the main differences.

LFS responses published from 15 July 2021 have been reweighted to new populations using growth rates from HM Revenue and Customs' (HMRC's) Real Time Information (RTI). This is to allow for different trends during the coronavirus pandemic. Our Impact of reweighting on Labour Force Survey key indicators, UK: 2020 article explains the reweighting methodology, which gives improved estimates of both rates and levels.