Jobs, pay and business survival
Jobs located in Portsmouth pay more than Portsmouth residents earn. The city has less than half England's share of professional and scientific jobs, more than a quarter of its jobs are public sector, and businesses started here are markedly less likely to reach five years.
Cost of living is raised constantly; the structure of the local economy behind it much less so. The council's own Big Portsmouth Survey asks about cost of living directly.
Affects roughly 104,000 employee jobs and every working household. Portsmouth resident earnings have been below England in every year on record, and the five-year business survival gap is more than eight percentage points.
Resident earnings have risen broadly in line with England without closing the gap. The public-sector share has risen steadily while private-sector jobs have fallen since 2018. Business births have fallen from 1,205 to 870 since 2019.
A note on survey data.ONS has not accredited Labour Force Survey and Annual Population Survey estimates as official statistics since October 2023, after survey response rates collapsed. Portsmouth's 2023 and 2024 employment readings sit about six points above its own decade average with wide margins of error, and are not treated here as a real jump. Where a more robust series exists — the claimant count, the earnings survey, the business register — it is used instead.
The city's jobs pay more than its residents earn
Jobs located in Portsmouth pay about £2,800 a year more than jobs held by Portsmouth residents — £38,815 against £36,022 in 2025. Portsmouth's workplace pay has run at or above the England average for most of the period. Its resident pay has been below England in every single year.
The city hosts better-paid jobs than its residents hold. Higher-paying work in Portsmouth is disproportionately done by people commuting in, while Portsmouth residents include a larger share working in lower-paid jobs. The direction is the opposite of Brighton and Hove, where residents out-earn the jobs located there because they commute out to better-paid work. That contrast is the single most informative earnings fact available for Portsmouth — and it is a far better answer than attributing the gap loosely to "the public sector".
Median gross annual pay, full-time. ASHE figures carry a coefficient of variation rather than a confidence interval. Portsmouth exceeds the 10% "unreliable" threshold on annual pay in 2010, 2020 and 2022, so those points should not carry weight on their own. 2025 is provisional.
Less than half England's share of professional jobs
Portsmouth has less than half England's share of professional, scientific and technical jobs — 4.3% against 9.6%, the single biggest gap in its economy. Financial services are half the national share. Public administration and defence, by contrast, is nearly double: 7.7% against 4.5%.
Percentage-point difference from the England share of employee jobs. Employee jobs, 2024. This is the concrete answer to "where are the high-value jobs?" — the deficit is not in manufacturing, which is slightly above the national share, but in professional and financial services.
Public sector share is rising, private jobs falling
More than a quarter of Portsmouth's employee jobs are now public sector — 26.9% against 17.9% across England, and the gap is widening. Private-sector employee jobs peaked in 2018 at 82,584 and stood at 75,689 in 2024, down 8.4%, while public-sector jobs rose 18.6%.
Public sector share of employee jobs
Jobs by sector, Portsmouth
Shares are derived by division from published counts, because Nomis returns a blank percentage field for this dataset. The counts themselves are as published.
Portsmouth businesses are less likely to reach five years
Of businesses born in Portsmouth in 2019, 29.9% were still trading five years later, against 38.3% across England — a gap of more than eight percentage points.
The divergence opens at year three, not year one: 46.9% of Portsmouth's 2019 cohort survived three years against 55.9% nationally. First-year survival was close to normal at 93.4%.
It is not a generic port-city or naval-city effect. Plymouth — comparable in size, also a naval city — is ABOVE the England average at 39.8%. Southampton is lower still than Portsmouth at 26.2%, so there may be a south-coast city pattern, but Plymouth breaks any simple maritime explanation.
A five-year rate exists only for the 2019 birth cohort — later cohorts are not yet mature and ONS publishes them as unavailable rather than estimating.
Business births and deaths
Business births in Portsmouth fell from 1,205 in 2019 to 870 in 2024, and the active business stock fell from 7,200 to 6,735. 2022 was the only year in which more businesses closed than opened.
Claimant count, consistently above England since 2020
Portsmouth's claimant rate peaked at 7.4% in May 2020 and has settled around 4.4–4.6%, persistently a little above the England figure.
Claimants as a proportion of residents aged 16–64. This is NOT an unemployment rate — it counts people claiming unemployment-related benefits, which since Universal Credit includes some people in work. Two structural breaks matter: the 2013–2018 Universal Credit rollout widened who is counted, and April 2020 combined COVID with a further widening of eligibility. Portsmouth peaked at 7.4% in May 2020.
Private employers and investors
The 2026 earnings survey, and business survival rates for the 2020 cohort
Little direct lever — this is where council economic development and MP advocacy matter most
Underlies the cost-of-living concerns raised persistently by residents, and answers a question repeatedly asked locally: where are the high-value jobs?
Public and political discussion indicates what people are raising. It is not evidence that a claim is true.
Verified facts
Full detail — why it matters, who else is involved, what is being done
- •Private employers and investors — Create the great majority of jobs — the decisive actor
- •Portsmouth City Council — Economic development, planning for employment land, skills partnerships
- •University of Portsmouth — Graduate supply and business support; retention is roughly 19% by the Council's own estimate
- •UK Government — Tax, business support, Freeport designations, defence procurement
- •ONS has not accredited Labour Force Survey and Annual Population Survey estimates as official statistics since October 2023, so recent local employment and inactivity rates carry wide margins and should not be read as precise.
- •No published explanation for the business survival gap, or for why it opens at year three rather than year one.
- •Business births and deaths are only published from 2019 in the current edition; earlier years require archived releases.
- •Long-term sickness inactivity for Portsmouth carries margins of ±8 to ±12 percentage points, so local year-on-year movement is not interpretable.
Sources & methodology (3) · last verified 2026-08-26
- ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings via Nomis — 2025-11-03
- ONS Business Register and Employment Survey via Nomis — 2025-10-28
- ONS Business Demography reference tables — 2025-11-20
What could be done, and what it would cost
Full action plan →UK Stat Pack's own analysis — not Portsmouth City Council or government policy. Each item states what is officially happening, if anything.
A shared port and naval-base apprenticeship pipeline
Not proposed officiallyWhy it might work, and the trade-offs
Employer-partnered technical education already works at small scale in Portsmouth (UTC Portsmouth's Ofsted results are strong); the constraint is scale and coordination, not a lack of any working model to build on.
Trade-offs. Coordinating multiple large, independent employers (private sector, MOD, NHS, further/higher education) is a genuine governance challenge, not just a funding one.
How we would know it worked. Apprenticeship starts per year across the coordinated pipeline; Graduate/apprentice retention rate in Portsmouth (tracked against the Council's ~19% baseline)
Insist Tipner West's marine employment space is built alongside the housing, not after it
Under discussionWhy it might work, and the trade-offs
This is a planning-conditions ask, not a new funding request — it uses a lever the council already has (planning obligations) rather than asking for new money.
Trade-offs. Tying housing delivery to commercial floorspace conditions can slow down urgently-needed housing if a developer argues the employment space is not viable — a genuine trade-off between speed of housing delivery and the jobs objective.
How we would know it worked. Marine employment floorspace actually delivered vs the 58,000 sqm allocation, tracked phase by phase