The Graduate Market Report
For more than two decades, High Fliers Research has been researching the graduate vacancies and starting salaries available at the UK’s leading employers.
This influential annual research is used by employers, universities, Government & policy makers, schools & sixth form colleges, students and graduates – to assess and analyse the latest outlook for graduate employment in the UK.
About the Research
The Graduate Market Report is based on research with the UK’s one hundred leading graduate employers, usually completed in December each year and then published in early January.
Each employer completes a short questionnaire and confirms the number of graduates recruited during the previous recruitment cycle and provides its latest graduate recruitment target for the year ahead. Employers also declare the starting salaries on offer to their new graduates – and the number of graduate job applications they have received in the first part of the recruitment season.
The results are analysed for employers in fifteen individual industries & business sectors – and the research shows the timeline of how graduate vacancies and starting salaries have changed over the past two decades.
An Unprecedented Drop in Graduate Jobs
The latest report on The Graduate Market in 2026 confirms that graduate recruitment at the country’s top employers has been cut by almost a quarter in the past three years – and is set to reduce further in 2026.
The continuing economic uncertainty following the General Election in 2024 meant that employers reduced their graduate recruitment by 5.1% in 2025, after a dramatic 14.6% drop in graduate vacancies in 2024, and a decrease of 6.4% in 2023.
Two-fifths of the country’s top employers recruited fewer graduates in 2025 and recruitment fell in ten out of fifteen key industries & business sectors. Employers’ latest recruitment targets show that there are likely to be even fewer graduate jobs available in 2026 – a further decrease of 0.5% compared with last year. Graduate recruitment at the UK’s leading employers has now slumped by 24.5% since 2022 – a larger reduction than was recorded during the pandemic in 2020 or in the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008-2009, when graduate vacancies fell by 12.3% and 23.3% respectively.
Employers Featured in the Research
A&O Shearman
Accenture
AECOM
Airbus
Aldi
AlphaSights
Amazon
Aon
Apple
Army
Arup
AstraZeneca
AtkinsRealis
Babcock International
BAE Systems
Bain & Co
Baker McKenzie
Bank of America Merrill Lynch
Barclays
BBC
BDO
Blackrock
Bloomberg
BNY
Boston Consulting Group
BP
British Airways
BT
Capgemini
Citi
Civil Service Fast Stream
Clifford Chance
Clyde & Co
CMS
Deloitte
Deutsche Bank
Diageo
DLA Piper
EDF Energy
Enterprise Mobility
Environment Agency
EY
ForvisMazars
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
Goldman Sachs
Google
Grant Thornton
GSK
Herbert Smith Freehills
HM Revenue & Customs
Hogan Lovells
HSBC
IBM
ITV
J.P. Morgan
JLR
Jane Street
KPMG
L'Oreal
Latham Watkins
Lidl
Linklaters
Lloyds Banking Group
Local Government
Lockheed Martin
M&S
McKinsey & Co
Microsoft
Morgan Stanley
Mott Macdonald
Natwest Group
Network Rail
Newton Consulting
NHS
Penguin Random House
Pfizer
Police Now
Procter & Gamble
PwC
RAF
Revolut
Rolls-Royce
Royal Navy
Santander
Savills
Scottish Power
Shell
Siemens
Sky
Slaughter & May
Sony
TeachFirst
Tesco
Transport for London
UBS
Unilever
Vodafone
Wellcome
White & Case
WSP
Future Reports
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