If you are looking for work
More than half of unemployed people had been looking for six months or less. But 474,000 had been out of work for more than a year, and there were 2.4 unemployed people for each vacancy, before counting people who already have a job and want another.
Send fewer, closer applications
An application that answers the advert stands out from the others in the pile. Paste the advert into the advert comparison to see which of its requirements your CV already shows, then write a cover letter that answers the rest.
A long gap is common, so say what you did
A short, honest line about the gap is enough: see how to explain a gap in your CV, and the complete examples for returning to work, after redundancy and older workers.
Bring your CV up to date
If your CV was written for your last job, update it with what you have done since, or start again from a free template.
How we count
The figures are ONS’s Labour Force Survey estimates for people aged 16 and over in the UK, seasonally adjusted, each covering a rolling three months. ONS counts someone as unemployed if they have no job, have looked for work in the last four weeks and can start within two weeks; “over 12 months” means they have been unemployed for more than a year. The unemployed-per-vacancy ratio is ONS’s own and leaves out agriculture, forestry and fishing, which its Vacancy Survey does not cover. We copy every figure as ONS publishes it, compute no shares or averages of our own, and keep the old value beside any figure ONS later revises. ONS says the Labour Force Survey estimates are official statistics; it is replacing the survey with a transformed, online-first one, so the series may change: read its labour market overview for its notes on quality.
Download the data and cite it
The CSV has one row for every rolling three months from March to May 1992 to June to August 2026: unemployed people, the three duration bands, the share over 12 months, vacancies (from 2001) and unemployed people per vacancy, with the ONS series each comes from. A blank cell is a figure ONS did not publish for that period.
Download the figures (CSV, 84 KB)
To cite these figures:
CVTemplates.co (2026). How long does it take to find a job in the UK?. Office for National Statistics figures for June to August 2026, published 20 October 2026. https://cvtemplates.co/research/how-long-to-find-a-job
You may reuse this figure and chart with a link to this page. The underlying figures are ONS’s, published under the Open Government Licence v3.0: name the Office for National Statistics as their source. Each row in the table above has its own link for citing one period.
Next figures expected: 17 November 2026, in ONS’s monthly labour market release. This page changes when they arrive.