Relationship between employment and health
About 2 mins
Key points
- A local area’s employment rate correlates to healthy life expectancy.
- In places with higher economic inactivity, people are more likely to have a lower healthy life expectancy.
There is a two-way relationship between work and health. Employment can bring better incomes, financial stability, security and greater sense of purpose, which in turn can lead to healthier diets and exercise, higher living standards, and better mental health. Poor health, on the other hand, can make it harder for people to participate in the labour market, as the recent rise in health-related working-age inactivity shows.
This chart shows the connection between healthy life expectancy at birth and a local area’s employment and economic inactivity rates, for men and women. Each chart highlights the local authority’s relative level of deprivation, whether in the most deprived 20%, the middle 60% or the least deprived 20%.
- People who live in areas with high employment rates are more likely to have higher healthy life expectancy.
- People living in an area with higher economic inactivity are more likely to have a lower healthy life expectancy.
It is worth noting that the most deprived areas, even when they have employment rates around the median, have below-average healthy life expectancy. This suggests that, as well as employment, other factors play a significant role in shaping health (for example income).
- All data are measured at the level of upper-tier local authorities in England, which are the level of counties, London boroughs, unitary authorities and metropolitan districts.
- Healthy life expectancy data is for the 3-year period between 2021 and 2023. Employment and inactivity rates are calculated for the 12 months to quarter 4 of 2024.
- Deprivation refers to the 2019 English Indices of Multiple Deprivation.
- Healthy life expectancy is the average number of years a person would expect to live in good health based on contemporary mortality rates and prevalence of self-reported good health.
- The employment rate is calculated as the number of working-age people (16–64 years old) in employment as a percentage of the total working-age population.
- The inactivity rate is calculated as the number of working-age people aged 16–64 years who are economically inactive – people without a job who have not sought employment in the last 4 weeks or are not available to start a job for the next 2 weeks – as a percentage of the total working-age population.
- Unemployment is not covered in this analysis because of low sample sizes at local authority level.
Source: Office for National Statistics, Annual Population Survey, England, Jan 2024–Dec 2024; Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, English Indices of Deprivation, England, 2019; Office for National Statistics, Health state life expectancies, UK, 2021–23
