Consumer interest in unemployment insurance more than doubled in 2025, increasing by 105.5% between Q1 and Q4, according to data from Best Insurance, suggesting that concerns among the UK workforce about the stability of the jobs market are increasing.
This reflects the latest UK unemployment rate, which remained at 5.1% in the three months to the end of November, according to ONS figures, although November’s single-month rate jumped to 5.4%, the joint highest in more than five years.
Claims among Best Insurance policyholders of unemployment cover also increased over the year, rising by 255% from Q1 to Q2 before falling back by 21% in Q3. Overall, the number of unemployment claims were 180% higher at the end of Q3 compared to the start of the year. Combined Accident, Sick & Unemployment (ASU) enquiries also increased by 10%.
People working in IT and financial services were most at risk of redundancy and job loss, with employees in these sectors most likely to make a claim on their unemployment cover. Those working more specifically in banking, insurance and telecoms were also at a heightened risk.
Workers in the private healthcare, charity and construction sectors made the most claims for accident and sickness in 2025.
Looking across all demographics, the Best Insurance figures show that those aged between 46-55 and 36-45 were most likely to be affected by an accident, sickness or redundancy over the last 12 months.
In total, the data found that people aged between 46 and 55 years old accounted for 30% of all ASU claims in Q1. This rose to 38.75% in Q3, while those aged between 36 and 45-years-old accounted for the largest number of claims (38.46%) in Q2.
Across all areas of ASU cover, the average claims size peaked in Q2, before falling back again in the third quarter of the year. In Q2, the average ASU claim size reached £2,605 – up from £2,112 in Q1 - before falling back to £1,981 in the third quarter of the year. A similar trend can be seen in the average claims size for unemployment only cover, which rose from £2,218 in Q1 to £2,766 in Q2 before dropping 27.9% to £1,994 in Q3.
"The sharp rise in unemployment enquiries and claims seen in 2025 reflects the growing uncertainty many households have faced over the course of last year as the labour market continued to soften," Kesh Thukaram, co-founder at Best Insurance, said, "unemployment enquiries often paint a picture of what we can expect to see happen in the jobs market because employees tend to have a sense of which direction their sector is heading. Based on the current data, the outlook is quite pessimistic.
"The trends are consistent by quarter across unemployment cover enquiries and claims. We see a rise in both these areas between Q1 to Q2, and then a small fall from Q2 to Q3. We then have a jump of 130% from Q3 to Q4 for enquiries, so it is likely that actual unemployment claims also increased at the end of 2025. We’ll have to wait and see what our data and the next round of ONS stats show, but it could be quite gloomy news for the UK jobs market."
