You asked

I recently looked at your “Monthly Wages and Salaries Survey” and “EARN01: Average Weekly Earnings” and wanted to ask if you had any data on the frequency of pay of the people in Great Britain. For example, how many people get paid weekly, biweekly and monthly.

We said

Thank you for your request.

We have two major earnings surveys that collect information on pay frequency. You referred to one of these, the Monthly Wages and Salaries Survey. This survey does collect the information, but does not hold it in a form that would allow us to provide estimates of the number of people being paid to each frequency.

However, our Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) also collects this information and we are able to provide estimates from it. We published this analysis - providing estimates of proportion of people paid weekly, fortnightly, four weekly and monthly - based on the latest ASHE data, for April 2017.

The estimates in this analysis relate to total UK rather than Great Britain. It would be possible to provide the information based on Great Britain only, but this would have to be applied for from our ad hoc analysis team, which provides a charged-for service.

As this information is already available to you via this route, we consider that s.21(1) applies to this request and the information does not have to be supplied under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. S.21(1) is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.