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Posted: Mon 22nd Jun 2026
4 min read
A shift towards entrepreneurship is helping drive down the unemployment rate, as financial pressures and a contraction in job vacancies push more people to start their own businesses.
Unemployment fell to 4.9% in the three months to April, according to the Office for National Statistics, as more people are choosing to work for themselves rather than seeking traditional employment, a trend Enterprise Nation predicted in our StartUp Ambition 2026 report earlier this year.
The Office for National Statistics reported the unemployment rate dropped to 4.9% in the three months to April, down on the quarter. But it is up on the year, from 4.6%, with .
While the headline unemployment figure dropped 0.3 percentage points over the quarter, the estimated number of vacancies in the UK also decreased. Early estimates for March to May 2026 suggest a decrease of 19,000 (2.6%) to 707,000, compared with December 2025 to February 2026. This is the lowest level of vacancies since February to April 2021.
Between December 2025 and March 2026, self-employment increased by 177,000 (4.4%).
Our research bears this out. The StartUp Ambition 2026 report, released at the start of this year, found that 41% of UK adults plan to start a business or are considering doing so this year – a striking figure that shows entrepreneurship is becoming a mainstream career choice.
Payroll data suggests the number of payrolled employees is down 138,000 over the year, and vacancies have fallen to their lowest level in five years.
With employee roles harder to find, the reasons people give for working for themselves are shifting. The official self-employment data is volatile, and ONS urges caution on the latest quarter, so we look to our own research for a clearer signal.
Our StartUp Ambition 2026 report found 41% of UK adults plan to start a business or are considering it this year. What has changed is the motivation.
For the first time in four years of our tracking, financial security leads over passion. Economic reasons are now the main driver, cited by 36%.
We called this founder the ‘income injector’. Someone starting up to protect their household income, not to chase a dream.
Sam Ikhuoria is doing exactly that. A visual artist from Newham, he is launching his fragrance business, NPareil, in September. After seeing people laid off in the pandemic with nothing to fall back on, he wanted income he controlled.
"A business or side hustle feels like a way to protect myself financially," he told us.
Daniel Woolf, head of policy at Enterprise Nation, said:
"The labour market is cooling, with vacancies at their lowest level since 2021. Self-employment appears to have picked up in the latest quarter, but remains below where it was a year ago, suggesting any recovery in self-employment is still at an early stage.
“Our research picked this trend up at the beginning of the year. It showed a slightly lower appetite to start-up (41% in 2026 vs 47% in 2025) but it also detected a shift in why people are starting up.
"For the first time in four years of conducting the same research, financial security has overtaken passion as the main reason to become your own boss in 2026.”
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