How Many Journalists Are There in the UK? (2026 Edition)

• An estimated 52,400 journalists worked in the UK in 2025, rising to approximately 94,000 when editors are included.
• The UK had around 78,800 PR professionals in 2025—roughly 1.5 PR professionals for every journalist.
• The estimated number of UK journalists fell by 11% between 2021 and 2025, although ONS data-quality issues make the exact trend uncertain.
• The PR-to-journalist ratio is similar in both countries: 1.6 to 1 in the UK versus 1.8 to 1 in the US in 2024.

Last week I posted a study I did on how many journalists there are in the US, and how it compared to PR professionals, and it was a mess.

One data set said one thing; another data set said a wildly different number.

I walked away with a PR-to-journalist ratio somewhere between 2 and 7 PR professionals for every one journalist in 2025.

I hoped that the UK numbers would be cleaner.

Unfortunately, they aren’t.

But an interesting story developed nonetheless.

So, let’s look at how many journalists there are in the UK, how many PR professionals, and how that compares to the US.

The Data Sources I Used (and Why It Matters)

For this study, I used two surveys from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS): Labour Force Survey (LFS) and the Annual Population Survey (APS).

However, the APS documentation says the LFS’s “variables and boost samples are also used to create the APS,” so there’s some overlap.

Both came from Nomis, which is effectively ONS’s data portal.

For the study, I looked at these codes:

Before 2021, the UK data used SOC 2010, which bundled journalists and editors into one code (2471).

So, a clean separation only exists from 2021 on, which is what I’ll use for most of this study.

Also, the APS behind these figures is built on the LFS, which collects responses from roughly 29,000 households a quarter.

On top of that, the ONS’s own advice is to treat year-to-year changes from this period with caution.

And when you combine that with the fact that the APS’s survey estimates get rounded to the nearest 100, everything becomes a little more nebulous.

Phewf.

All that said, I promise there’s still some good takeaways in here…stick with me.

How Many Journalists Are There in the UK?

As of 2025, ~52,400 journalists work in the UK according to the APS. However, if we include editors, this rises to ~94,000.

Here it is in table format:

Since 2021, the number of journalists appears to have decreased.

But there’s more to the story.

First off, you might notice a big fluctuation in 2023.

Here’s my take based on what I know:

The APS (where the numbers come from) is based on the UK’s Labor Force Survey, which has quality problems because so few people responded.In 2023, the ONS even had to suspend some of its figures from being reported!

(They’ve since announced some big changes.)

So, it’s hard to look at these numbers without acknowledging a big margin of error.

What this ultimately means is that it might be relatively flat or decreasing, but not conclusively.

What About All of the Layoffs in the News?

Again, the Press Gazette does an amazing job tracking journalist layoffs, and that was the first thing I thought of when I saw these drops.

But two things to keep in mind:

First, layoffs aren’t the same as net employment, meaning a newsroom can cut 50 people while others hire, and totals barely move.

Second, the Press Gazette tracker combines the US and UK.

Based on their 2025 tracker, the Press Gazette reported that about two-thirds (67%) of the journalism job cuts recorded were in the US, with just over 30% in the UK.

Three-quarters were in the US in 2024.

That said, the UK cuts are definitely happening, and you can see it in the news.

Reach announced about 190 cuts.

BBC cut about 130 roles.

So the layoffs story may suggest that UK newsroom jobs are decreasing (potentially due to automation, search traffic dropping, or both).

How Many Journalists vs PR Professionals Are There in the UK?

In 2025, there were 78,800 PR professionals vs 52,400 journalists in the UK, according to the APS.

So, PR professionals outnumber journalists in the UK by about 1.5 to 1.

Here’s what that ratio looks like over time:

There is less flip-flopping YOY with the PR professional job totals, which makes me think that these numbers are at least more directionally trustworthy.

And if you’re wondering why we start at 2021, as I mentioned earlier, the UK used to bundle editors with journalists; then the numbers split in 2021, so that’s as far back as we can go.

But if you’re interested in the editor view, let’s dig in.

The Longer, Messier View with Editors

We have a longer data window on journalists in the UK, similar to the US, but it gets messier because we need to add in editors.

When we bundle journalists and editors, the ratio actually flips, where journalists and editors outnumber PR professionals.

Here’s what it looks like in table form:

This basically tells me that PR spent two decades behind the journalist-and-editor combo count but has recently started to close the gap.

Which raises the next question: if we strip out the editors, how does this match with the US counts?

So How Does This Compare to the US?

In 2024, the US had 1.8 PR pros per journalist vs. the UK’s 1.6 PR pros per journalist.

I’m using 2024 for both here, since that’s the most recent year the US Census has.

Here’s the table:

*Note: the UK figure here is 2024’s 50,000, not the 52,400 I’ve used elsewhere — I’m matching the US Census’s latest year

Also, we can’t compare these too closely.

Why?

Because the two countries still don’t count in quite the same way.

The US number is journalists only; the UK number, even at its cleanest, is fuzzy.

But even so, the famous 7-to-1 US figure, based on payrolled employees (not freelancers like our above numbers include), has no real equivalent in the UK.

What Does This Mean for You in PR?

Once again, I wish I had a super clear number that I could lean on, but there are too many crazy variables in the mix.

But overall, the message is still similar to the US: there are still more PR professionals than journalists, and the gap seems to be widening.

Methodology

I used two sources from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS), both pulled from Nomis, the ONS’s public data portal: the Annual Population Survey (APS) for occupational headcounts, and the Labour Force Survey (LFS) that sits underneath it.

The APS is the UK’s largest annual household survey.

It’s built from the LFS plus extra “boost” samples in England, Wales, and Scotland, making it large enough to produce figures for small groups like a single occupation.

Like the US Census ACS, it counts people by self-reported occupation and includes the self-employed and freelancers; it counts each person at their main job only.

The occupation codes I used are the UK’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) 2020 codes: 2492 for newspaper and periodical journalists and reporters, 2491 for newspaper and periodical editors, and 2493 for public relations professionals.

Broadcast journalists sit inside 2492, so unlike some cuts of the US data, this number isn’t stripped of broadcast people.

Before 2021, the UK used SOC 2010, which bundled journalists and editors together into a single code (2471) rather than splitting them.

This is the UK’s version of the code-change breaks in the US series: comparing across it takes care, so I’ve kept the journalists-only and journalists-plus-editors views clearly separate rather than stitching them into one line.

All figures are calendar-year (January to December) periods.

These numbers come with real error bars, and I’ve tried not to overstate them.