UK small businesses defy economic uncertainty with 30,000 new jobs in Q1
Despite mounting cost pressures, shifting tariffs, and a turbulent economic outlook, UK small businesses are fueling a surprising surge in employment growth. The latest figures from the Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index reveals that UK small businesses with 1–9 employees created 28,700 new jobs in the first quarter of 2025. This marks the second consecutive quarterly increase and suggests renewed momentum in small business hiring despite broader economic uncertainty.
The Intuit Small Business Index is based on actual payroll data from 26,000 UK small businesses, providing real-time data about their performance, rather than through a survey. The coverage of small businesses can be poor in small-scale surveys, or their statistics are revealed with a lag of months. The Intuit Small Business Index fills this gap by providing timely insights on small business activity in the US, Canada, and the UK, for policy makers, researchers, and industry.
Job growth across the board
All 13 sectors covered by the Index reported rising employment in Q1, with the wholesale and retail trade sector seeing the strongest growth—adding 5,200 jobs. This aligns with recent ONS retail sales figures, which showed sales volumes rising by 1.4% in January and a further 1% in February, reaching their highest levels since July 2022.
Other strong performing sectors included professional services and construction, reflecting modest gains in construction output (0.4% in January 2025) and steady demand for advisory services. Small business employment in the real estate sector is now higher than at any point since 2018, when the Index’s records began, with total employment now at 168,400.
Says Rob Burlison, director of International Corporate Affairs at Intuit, “We’re seeing the green shoots of small business confidence returning, particularly in retail and construction. Employment growth across every sector, and particularly in the East of England and London, reflects cautious optimism from business owners, even as they remain watchful of cost pressures and economic uncertainty.
East of England has the fastest-growing small business employment in the UK
At the regional level, the East of England led the country with a 1.04% rise in small business employment, adding 4,000 new jobs—the fastest regional growth rate in the UK. Across England as a whole, small businesses created 25,900 jobs. Small businesses across London and the South East added over 11,000 jobs, accounting for more than a third of national quarterly gains.
While small business employment remains above pre-pandemic levels, it has trended downwards overall since Q2 2021, reflecting broader structural shifts in the labour market. Nonetheless, the return to growth across all sectors may signal a stabilising jobs outlook for the UK’s 5.5 million small businesses.
Reference and Methodology
*The Small Business Index is a collaboration between Intuit QuickBooks and an international team of economists led by Professor Ufuk Akcigit, the Arnold C. Harberger Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. It uses administrative data from anonymized QuickBooks Payroll and QuickBooks Online accounting records (not survey data) in combination with official statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Statistics Canada, and the UK’s Office for National Statistics.
This ensures the Index reflects the general population of small businesses in each country, not the performance of QuickBooks customers or Intuit’s business. The total worldwide sample is 557,000 small businesses. For more information, see https://quickbooks.intuit.com/r/small-business-data/index/methodology/
UK national sample: 26,000 small businesses using QuickBooks Payroll (employment index).