A new report by Cambridge Circus Research finds that the rise in migrant employment since 2015 has reduced the pay of British workers outside London, with the largest effects falling on those in the lower half of the wage distribution.

Wages After the Wave: The cost of migration on native pay uses previously unpublished HMRC payroll data covering UK and non-UK nationals across 147 English local authorities between 2014 and 2025.

Hubert Kucharski, author of the report, said:

“We are now at the point where we must accept that migration affects what British workers are paid, and the question has become whether policy will take that cost into account.”

Key findings include:

• Each additional migrant job per 100 residents outside London reduced median pay among UK nationals by around 1.1 per cent.
• The rise in migrant employment since 2015 left the typical British worker outside London around £1,060 a year worse off by 2025.
• The report estimates that British workers’ median-equivalent wage bill outside London was around £18.2 billion lower in 2025, with a cumulative shortfall of around £78 billion between 2016 and 2025.
• The burden falls disproportionately on the lower half of the pay distribution, with workers around the 30th, 40th and 50th percentiles estimated to have lost around £1,240–£1,510 a year.
• Most of the effect appears to come through lower hourly pay rather than fewer hours worked.
• Migrants did not replace British workers one-for-one. Outside London, the report estimates that around four native jobs were lost for every ten migrant jobs added, meaning total employment still rose.
• Four in five of the additional payrolled jobs created between 2015 and 2025 were held by non-UK nationals.
• The effect differs sharply in London, where migrant inflows come disproportionately from higher-income countries and rising housing costs may change the composition of who remains in an area.

The report calls for:

• tighter restrictions on visa routes that support large-scale low-wage employment;
• greater use of salary thresholds to limit lower-paid migration;
• shortage routes to be focused on roles genuinely important to Britain’s industrial strategy;
• HMRC to publish local payroll employment and pay data by nationality as regular official statistics;
• accredited researchers to be given better access to payroll data so the mechanisms behind the wage effect can be studied more closely.

The report does not claim that migration has made the British economy as a whole smaller. Its central finding is distributional: migration can increase employment and economic activity while still reducing the share of those gains received by British workers.

ENDS