People from more advantaged backgrounds held 62% of UK music and arts jobs in 2025, official tables show

The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport published tables on November 5, 2026, that show who holds jobs in the country's creative sectors by family background. In July to September 2025, people from what the department calls more advantaged backgrounds held 221,000 of the 355,000 filled jobs in music, performing and visual arts, or 62%. Across all UK jobs, the share was 50% (our calculations from the tables).

People from less advantaged backgrounds held 19% of music and arts jobs, against 27% across the economy. The new tables add this breakdown to the department's annual employment estimates, first published in July.

How the sectors compare

Audio visual and computer games are extra groupings that sit outside the department's sector total. Audio visual covers film, video and TV production, sound recording and music publishing, and radio and TV broadcasting, among other activities. Computer games covers game publishing and ready-made interactive entertainment software. The games sample is too thin to say much about the split: the coefficient of variation, the tables' quality measure, is 47% for the less advantaged group and 30% for unknown, above the 20% line at which the tables call an estimate unreliable.

What the labels mean

A 2022 technical report from the department's predecessor, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, described background as measured by a parent or guardian's occupation, living status and household earning status when the respondent was 14, an approach similar to one recommended by the Social Mobility Commission. Neither that report nor the technical report for this release sets out where the line between more and less advantaged falls. The figures come from the Labour Force Survey and cover only July to September because the survey's modules rotate.

The unknown group is large. Counting only jobs where background is known, the more advantaged share is 77% in music and arts and 65% across the UK (our calculations).

A jump that may not be firm

Both shares rose sharply in 2025, though the music and arts share only returned to its 2020 level. The department's 95% range for more advantaged music and arts jobs is 187,000 to 256,000 in 2025 and 121,000 to 189,000 in 2024, and the ranges for all music and arts jobs, 312,000 to 399,000 and 232,000 to 330,000, also overlap. Across all UK jobs, the more advantaged ranges do not overlap, at 15,451,000 to 16,057,000 in 2024 and 17,361,000 to 17,898,000 in 2025, but the unknown share fell in the same year, from 29% to 23% (our calculation), and the tables cannot show how much of the rise that explains.

The department classes the estimates as official statistics in development, and its technical report relays advice from the Office for National Statistics to treat Labour Force Survey estimates with additional caution. Its main employment series, built on a larger survey, put creative industries at 2,464,000 jobs in 2025 and found no statistically significant change in any sector from 2024.

Most of the work is self-employed

The tables also show how differently these jobs are organized. In music, performing and visual arts, 226,000 of the 355,000 jobs, or 64%, were self-employed, compared with 28% in the creative industries as a whole and 14% across all UK jobs (our calculations). The department says the next update to the tables will come in 2027.