Financial services job market index – December 2025

Financial services job market index – December 2025

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Executive Summary

There is no silver bullet when it comes to measuring demand in the U.K. financial services job market.

Over the years we have looked at everything from indices from recruitment agencies, aggregated job board data as well as government/ONS data. All of them are useful indicators but fail to offer an accurate reflection of what’s happening across Financial Services as well as individual and significant sub-sectors.

The City Career LAB & Rialto job market index captures data directly from corporate careers sites as a way of measuring jobs activity – specifically demand. It’s not perfect, but is perhaps the most accurate indicator of hiring demand in the U.K. financial services jobs market.

Each month we collect and analyse data from a broad and diverse basket of handpicked employers that represent a particular sub-sector of Financial Services in the U.K. These results which include all permanent and fixed term contract positions across all functions of the chosen organisations will be published on our website and LinkedIn – to show and explain the direction of the hiring market(s) from month to month.

Our observations this month include:

• This is a disappointing but not wholly unexpected set of results as the market starts to slow down ahead of year end, and it underlines the fact that UK FS hiring is still in the doldrums.
• There were no risers this month across the sub sectors – demonstrating that this is a universal trend across Financial Services
• Amongst the fallers, Banking & Markets (-13%) and Wealth & Private Banking (-11%) fell the hardest with notable drop offs in activity at Citi, UBS and Hargreaves Lansdowne.
• In terms of Year-on-Year results – the overall index is up 8% versus this time last year, which has shortened from 16% last month, indicating a more radical November drop off than in 2024.

As a reminder – the Job Market Index is intended to be the most accurate read on hiring demand in the UK financial services sector.

The indicators show:

Banking & Markets: Corporate & Investment Banking, Markets, Securities Services (excl. Consumer/retail) -13%
Investment management: Asset Management, Alternatives -3%
Insurance: General, Life, Reinsurance, Broking -6%
Wealth & Private Banking: -11%
Fintech: Banking, Lending, Payments, Insurtech, Crowdfunding -8%
Information Services: Data Providers, Ratings Agencies, Risk -5%