At the Low Pay Commission’s (LPC) Research Symposium on 4th September 2025, the Wage and Employment Dynamics (WED) team reaffirmed their vision to develop the UK’s next generation of linked employer–employee data (LEED). A great deal of work has already been done by the team to build on the Annual Survey of Hours and Earning (ASHE). More work is planned, to create even more resources for understanding pay, mobility, and inequality in the labour market.
Check out the presentation held at the LPC Research Symposium here.
Building on ASHE
At the heart of the project is the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the UK’s primary source of detailed pay information. WED has been working to strengthen ASHE by:
- Improving representativeness through new weighting methods.
- Developing tools to adjust for attrition in longitudinal samples.
- Enriching the dataset with derived variables such as wage deflators and National Minimum Wage rates.
The result is the WED Enriched ASHE, now available to researchers via the ONS Secure Research Service, complete with open documentation and code.
Understanding the Bigger Picture
WED’s innovation lies in linking ASHE to other data sources:
- Census 2011 and 2021: Adding household, education, and demographic characteristics to wage data.
- HMRC PAYE Real-Time Information (RTI) and Self Assessment (SA): Filling in the gaps between ASHE’s annual snapshots to capture monthly earnings, employment transitions, and self-employment income.
- Migrant Worker Scan: Identifying overseas nationals in the UK workforce to better understand migration and pay.
Together, these linkages open new possibilities for studying wage progression, inequality, and labour market dynamics with an unprecedented level of detail.
Towards a 100% LEED
The long-term vision is even more ambitious: to build a universal LEED system for the UK, with PAYE RTI data forming the “spine.” This would allow researchers and policymakers to track employment and pay across the entire workforce, not just a sample. Early steps are already underway through collaborations with the ONS and ADR UK.
What’s Next
The project is moving fast. The ASHE–Census 2021 linkage is expected be released to researchers by the end of 2025, with training planned for early 2026. Linked PAYE/SA and Migrant Worker data are also coming online. Each release expands the analytical toolkit available for understanding the realities of low pay and labour market change.
For researchers and policymakers alike, the WED project represents a step-change in the UK’s data infrastructure. By connecting the dots between existing datasets, it promises to transform our ability to answer some of the most pressing questions about wages, work, and fairness.