Arts: Employment
(asked on 10th March 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what estimate her Department has made of the number of people employed in the creative industries in each of the last five years.
DCMS Economic Estimates provide annual estimates of employment in the creative industries in the UK, based on the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Annual Population Survey. The total number of filled jobs in the creative industries for 2019 to 2024 are presented below. Employment data for 2025 is not yet available.
In 2024, there were 2.4 million filled jobs in the creative industries. This is a 308,000 (14.7%) increase from 2019.
Table 1: Filled jobs in the creative industries, 2019 to 2024, with lower and upper confidence intervals (95% confidence level)
| Filled jobs: 2024 (Latest estimate) | Lower Bound Confidence Interval | Upper Bound Confidence Interval |
2024 | 2,409,006 | 2,320,038 | 2,497,974 |
2023 | 2,418,799 | 2,316,949 | 2,520,649 |
2022 | 2,396,138 | 2,308,575 | 2,483,701 |
2021 | 2,339,038 | 2,260,395 | 2,417,681 |
2020 | 2,221,204 | 2,148,506 | 2,299,428 |
2019 | 2,100,695 | 2,039,601 | 2,161,789 |
This table includes confidence intervals which provide a range within which the ‘true’ value is likely to be. This helps us to assess whether changes over time are statistically significant, giving us confidence that we are seeing a real effect, rather than due to change or random factors in the survey used to collect the data.