Five years after the pandemic devastated self-employment, LSE's Centre for Economic Performance finds the sector finally on the mend. Road to recovery: Self-employed on the mend?, the eighth report in a survey series by Stephen Machin, Robert Blackburn and Maria Ventura, draws on 1,823 responses collected between August and November 2025, weighted to represent the self-employed population. Roughly two-thirds of respondents say income, profits and hours now match or exceed pre-pandemic levels.
Wellbeing is improving too, especially among younger workers, and the share reporting difficulty meeting basic expenses in the past month has fallen to 21 per cent, the lowest across all eight survey waves. But the recovery is uneven. Some 29 per cent would still move to an employee job at the same salary, down from 41 per cent previously, and around half of those actively seeking an exit would accept a pay cut to make the switch. Workers for app-based platforms report longer hours without correspondingly higher pay.
The report also documents political drift: while more respondents voted Labour than any other party in July 2024, fewer than half would do so again, with support fragmenting towards Reform, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. Official data cited by the authors show self-employment fell by about 800,000 during Covid and has stayed broadly flat since, suggesting labour market conditions, not entrepreneurial surges, drive the sector's size.