The gap between the employment rate of disabled and non-disabled people in the UK has remained at 29.4 percentage points, with no statistically significant improvement since 2019, according to official figures published on 4 November.
The Department for Work and Pensions statistics show 5.6 million disabled people in work, an employment rate of 53 per cent against 82.4 per cent for non-disabled people.
The detail behind the headline
Disabled unemployment was 8.7 per cent, more than double the 4.1 per cent rate for non-disabled people, and has risen by 1.8 percentage points in two years. That combination of a static employment gap and rising unemployment suggests that disabled people are finding it harder both to enter work and to keep it.
The year to June 2026 was the first full year since 2014 in which the number of disabled people and the disability prevalence rate both fell, by about 50,000 and 0.2 percentage points respectively. Statisticians have cautioned against reading too much into a single year’s movement, since changes in survey response and in how people describe their health can move the numbers.
One in five working-age people, 8.4 million, now report a work-limiting health condition. The number of disabled people whose main condition is a mental health problem has risen 94.5 per cent, or 1.17 million, since 2014.
What employers are doing
Research by the Work Foundation at Lancaster University found that fewer than half of employers, 44 per cent, design jobs with workers’ health needs in mind. The foundation warned that the government risks a lost decade on closing the gap if policy continues to focus on welfare conditionality rather than on workplace practice.
The practical barriers are well documented: rigid shift patterns, premises that cannot be adapted, managers who lack training in managing health conditions, and recruitment processes that screen out people with gaps in their employment history.
Adjustments that keep people in work are often cheap. Flexible hours, modified equipment, quieter workspace and phased returns after sick leave cost far less than recruitment and retraining, but they require a manager with the authority and knowledge to agree them.
The young people falling through
Around 45 per cent of the roughly one million young people not in education, employment or training are disabled, and disabled young people are more than three times as likely to be in that position as their non-disabled peers.
That overlap matters because the longer someone is out of work at the start of their career, the harder it becomes to return. Support that is designed for adults with established work histories does not fit young people who have never had a job.
What happens next
Two reviews will shape policy: the Timms Review on disability-related welfare and the Milburn Review on young people not in education, employment or training. Both are expected to recommend changes to how support is delivered rather than simply increasing the money available.
The government has argued that its reforms will help more disabled people into work by improving employment support and reforming the health and disability benefits system. The figures published this week suggest that the scale of the challenge has not yet been matched by the scale of the response.
For disabled people already in work, the risk is different. A static gap combined with rising unemployment points to a retention problem as much as a recruitment one, and retention is where adjustments, management training and occupational health make the most difference.
