Reading Between the Lines of the Disability Employment Statistics 2026

The employment figures are an important measure of participation. On their own, though, they do not tell us whether disabled people can enter work, stay in it and progress on fair terms. I have more than 25 years’ experience in commercial leadership and project controls. I also have a physical disability. So I read the latest figures as evidence about individuals, and about how work is organised.

The Department for Work and Pensions published The employment of disabled people 2026 on 4 November. It holds a lot of detail beneath the headline employment rate for disabled people. Some of that detail complicates the picture.

Progress in the headline, a different story underneath

The headline measure puts disabled people’s employment rate at 53%, against 82.4% for non-disabled people. The disability employment gap is 29.4 percentage points. That is still a big difference in access to work.

But look closely at the report’s prevalence-adjusted measure. This measure accounts for changes in the share of people classed as disabled over time. On this measure, the gap has grown from 5.4 percentage points in April to June 2019 to 7.2 points in April to June 2026. That runs against the longer-term direction of the conventional gap.

Neither measure should be dismissed. They answer different questions. The conventional measure shows the difference in employment rates between disabled and non-disabled people. The adjusted measure shows how that difference changes when the number of disabled people shifts. Read together, they make it harder to claim that equality is steadily improving.

The report also says disabled people are more likely to work part-time, be underemployed or work in lower-skilled jobs. They are less likely to hold managerial, director or senior-official roles: 8.9% of employed disabled people, against 11.6% of non-disabled workers. So a job does not always mean equal access to secure work, suitable hours or progression.

The movement into and out of work matters

A snapshot of who is in work cannot show how stable that position is. The report’s flow data shows unequal movement: disabled workers leave work at higher rates. Workless disabled people enter work at much lower rates than non-disabled people. Put plainly, getting a job is harder, and staying in one is less certain.

That distinction shapes how I understand the disability employment gap in the UK. If policy focuses mainly on recruitment, it risks missing what decides whether someone can stay in a role. Inaccessible recruitment, inflexible working arrangements and stalled progression are not small inconveniences. Scope highlights these barriers. They shape who gets an opportunity, and who can keep using it.

The data on people outside work also challenges an assumption: that not being in a job means not wanting one. Disabled people are more likely to be economically inactive (out of work and not looking for work), with long-term sickness often given as the main reason. Yet they are also more likely to say they want a job. The gap between wanting work and getting work is exactly where practical support, suitable roles and accessible processes matter.

The pattern starts early. Among disabled young people not in education, employment or training, 59.3% gave disability or ill-health as their main reason. Their move into work was also much lower than for non-disabled young people. Those figures should prompt us to look hard at the routes into employment. They should not lead us to assume young disabled people lack potential.

The social model view of the evidence

I have written before about the Social Model of Disability and unconscious ableism. Its relevance here is direct: people are disabled by barriers as well as by their impairment or health condition. A workplace built around one assumed way of travelling, communicating, working or progressing can shut people out. No one has to decide to exclude them. It happens by design.

That distinction changes the practical question. Instead of asking only what an individual can manage, organisations can ask which parts of a role, recruitment process or workplace create unnecessary disadvantage. Then they can change those parts. The question shifts from “can this person cope?” to “what in the system is getting in the way?”

What the figures record	What an organisation should look at
Who is employed	Are recruitment and selection accessible?
Who leaves work	Do adjustments and flexibility arrive in time?
Which roles people hold	Is progression open and measurable?
Who wants work but is outside it	Are the routes into suitable jobs practical?

A useful way to keep the focus on responsibility is:

Listen to lived experience → identify the barrier → change the process or environment → check whether access and retention improve

That is not a replacement for evidence. It is a way to use evidence to make better decisions.

What disabled people’s organisations are saying

Scope’s Work Without Barriers blueprint gives a clear reading of the gap: it reflects structural barriers, not a lack of ambition or desire to work. Its members describe inaccessible recruitment, inflexible work and limited progression. Scope is calling for a national disability employment strategy, reform of Access to Work and mandatory disability pay-gap reporting.

Access to Work matters most when someone needs support to enter or stay in a role. Delays and inconsistent decisions can leave practical adjustments unresolved when they are needed. The National Audit Office’s review of the scheme also raised concerns about processing delays and uneven decision-making. An adjustment that arrives late may not deliver the retention benefit it was meant to provide.

The MS Trust makes a related point about neurological conditions. Its work and study guidance and its call for neurorehabilitation as “a right, not a luxury” show how much timely, specialist support matters. People with MS can face leaving work within years of diagnosis when flexible support is not there. That is not a sign that people lack capability. It points to a system that has not reliably connected people with the support that could help them carry on.

The same logic holds across long-term health conditions of every kind. Condition-specific charities work at the sharp end of this. They hear from members who want to work, and who lose jobs not because their condition forces them out, but because adjustments arrive too late or not at all. The lesson is not about any one condition. It is about how quickly a workplace responds when someone’s needs change.

Read the changes in prevalence with care

The report estimates that one in five working-age people now report a work-limiting health condition. That is up from 6.0 million in FYE 2014 to 8.4 million in FYE 2026. It also records the first annual fall in the number and prevalence of disabled people since FYE 2014. But it warns that it is too early to say whether that change will last. Quarterly data, meanwhile, showed a significant rise of 250,000.

There is another important qualification. More than a quarter of people classed as disabled one year were not classed that way the next. That movement is a reminder that these categories come from survey answers at particular points in time. It does not mean that people’s support needs simply disappear. A person who falls out of the category in one survey year may still need the same adjustment at work the next.

The report itself warns that Labour Force Survey figures are Official Statistics in Development (early figures, still being tested and refined). Response-rate problems and volatility make them harder to interpret. That caveat does not make the findings unusable. It means short-term changes need careful treatment, especially when they may influence policy or public claims about progress.

From measurement to accountability

The strongest reading of this report is not that no progress has been made. More people are in work than before, and that matters. But a higher number of disabled people in work does not, on its own, prove equal opportunity or lasting inclusion. The detail on progression, retention and movement into work calls for wider scrutiny.

Employers can check whether recruitment is accessible, adjustments are timely, flexible arrangements are workable and progression is tracked. Public bodies can check whether support schemes deliver when people need them. Policy-makers can use measures that separate participation from the quality and stability of work.

Procurement is another lever, as I wrote on LinkedIn this week; here, the focus is the wider employment evidence and what it asks of workplaces.

The central test is whether disabled people can take part in working life without being expected to carry the cost of systems designed around someone else. The statistics show the scale of the disparity. The testimony of disability organisations helps explain how it feels. Both point to the same responsibility: remove barriers, make support dependable and judge progress by whether access, retention and progression improve.

Author: Nick Garvey, a commercial leadership and project controls professional with 25+ years’ experience and a physical disability. MCIOB, FCaSA and FQSi. All views my own, shared in a personal capacity.