Indicator
Insecure work by health status and age group
Published
7 May 2024
Last updated
25 April 2025
Time to read
About 2 mins
About 2 mins
Key points
- Higher proportions of people in insecure employment report having a work-limiting health condition than people in secure jobs (15% compared with 13%).
- The difference in health is largest for workers in the 45–54 age group: 17% of people in insecure work have a long-term work-limiting health condition. This compares with 13% of people not in insecure work.
- Poor health becomes more common as the workforce ages but there remains a difference in the prevalence of long-term work-limiting conditions between workers in secure and insecure employment.
Job insecurity can cause stress, which affects health, due to its unpredictability and the lack of power people can have.
This chart shows the proportion of workers who report having a work-limiting health condition that has lasted 12 months or more, split by employment security and age group, in 2024.
Overall, people in insecure work are more likely to report a work-limiting long-term health condition than people in secure work:
- The difference between the proportion of people with a work-limiting long-term health condition in insecure employment and secure employment is largest for people aged 45–54, where 16.9% of people in insecure work have a work-limiting health condition. This is 3.6 percentage points higher than for people in secure employment.
- People aged 16–19 and 20–24 show the opposite pattern. Long-term health conditions are slightly more common among people in non-insecure jobs.
- Relative differences between secure and insecure work diminish for older age groups, likely due to long-term health conditions becoming more prevalent as people age.
- This indicator is based on a framework provided to the ONS by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, modified to include zero-hour contracts.
- Insecure employment is made up of four categories: individuals employed on zero-hour contracts; workers employed through an employment agency; individuals in a job that is in some way not permanent; and individuals self-employed in vulnerable sectors (caring and leisure; process, plant and machine operatives; elementary occupations).
- Work-limiting health conditions are defined as health conditions lasting longer than 12 months and that limit either the kind or amount of paid work the respondent can undertake.
- Figures are based on averages of Q2 and Q4 data.
Source: Office for National Statistics, Quarterly Labour Force Survey, UK, 2024
