Young people in Rotherham have fewer suitable job vacancies available locally than anywhere else in Britain, according to new analysis which exposes a striking divide in employment opportunities between different parts of the country.
Research published by the Institute for Public Policy Research on 16 September found just 46 suitable online vacancies for every 1,000 people aged 18 to 24 in Rotherham.
That works out at approximately one suitable vacancy for every 22 young people.
At the opposite end of the measure, the Cotswold district had 288 vacancies for every 1,000 young adults, more than six times the Rotherham rate. The national average was 109.
Sheffield also ranked towards the bottom of the index, suggesting the problem is not confined to one side of the South Yorkshire boundary.
The figures do not mean there are literally only 46 jobs available in Rotherham, nor that 21 out of every 22 young people are unemployed.
Instead, they measure the availability of jobs which researchers judged likely to be realistically accessible to people entering the labour market.
But when combined with Rotherham’s existing unemployment figures, the results point to a genuine local problem.
What does the Rotherham jobs figure actually measure?
The IPPR analysed online job advertisements recorded by the Office for National Statistics between July 2025 and June 2026.
It then identified occupations likely to provide entry-level opportunities, based on relatively low requirements for previous experience and entry qualifications.
Those vacancies were compared with the latest estimated population of people aged 18 to 24 in each local authority.
Rotherham came out at the bottom.
The methodology is important.
A vacancy for an experienced engineer, consultant or senior manager would not necessarily tell an 18-year-old looking for their first job very much about the opportunities available to them. The IPPR instead attempted to isolate the kind of work younger entrants could reasonably be expected to compete for.
It also means the index is a measure of advertised opportunity, rather than unemployment itself.
Some vacancies are never advertised online. Young people can commute into neighbouring areas. Apprenticeships, temporary work and informal recruitment may not all be captured equally.
Rotherham and Sheffield are particularly difficult to treat as completely separate labour markets. Large numbers of people travel between the two areas for work, while employment sites around Templeborough, Meadowhall, Tinsley and the Lower Don Valley effectively form a continuous economic corridor across the council boundary.
Even with that caveat, Sheffield itself also appeared among the places with relatively few suitable vacancies in the IPPR analysis.
The problem therefore cannot be explained simply by saying young people in Rotherham can look a few miles away.
Youth unemployment is already higher in Rotherham
Separate official labour-market figures show that younger people in Rotherham are already considerably more likely to be claiming unemployment-related benefits than the wider population.
In August 2026, 1,515 people aged 18 to 24 in Rotherham were included in the claimant count.
That represented 7.7 per cent of the local population in that age group.
The equivalent figure was 6.6 per cent across Yorkshire and the Humber and 5.9 per cent across Great Britain.
Among 18 to 21-year-olds in Rotherham, the claimant rate was even higher at 8.9 per cent.
Across all working-age groups, Rotherham’s claimant count was considerably lower at 3.6 per cent.
The comparison reinforces the particular difficulty facing younger workers.
Rotherham’s wider employment rate also remains below national levels. Between April 2025 and March 2026, an estimated 70.2 per cent of working-age residents were in employment, compared with 75.5 per cent across Great Britain.
Rotherham had an estimated 0.65 jobs for every resident aged 16 to 64 in the latest jobs-density figures, compared with 0.85 nationally.
There is an unusual contradiction
Perhaps the most interesting part of Rotherham’s labour market is that employers also say they struggle to find workers.
Rotherham Council’s Employment and Skills Strategy says 58 per cent of vacancies identified locally were considered hard to fill.
Employers reported problems including too few applicants, insufficient interest in particular jobs, unsuitable skills and unattractive terms and conditions.
So Rotherham simultaneously has relatively few entry-level vacancies available to its young population and employers reporting difficulty filling some of the vacancies that do exist.
That suggests the problem is more complicated than simply creating a larger number of job advertisements.
Location, transport, qualifications, experience, pay, working conditions and the match between employers and applicants can all determine whether a vacancy represents a realistic opportunity.
An industrial employer struggling to recruit an experienced technician does little to help an unemployed 19-year-old without the qualifications for the job.
Equally, a theoretically entry-level vacancy is of limited value if reaching the workplace requires transport that does not operate at the beginning or end of a shift.
The problem starts before the age of 18
There are also warning signs among younger teenagers leaving school.
Council analysis previously found that the number of 16 and 17-year-olds in Rotherham who were not in education, employment or training had increased substantially compared with before the pandemic.
There were 313 young people aged 16 to 17 recorded as NEET in 2023, equivalent to around 5 per cent of the age group, up from 195 and 3 per cent in 2019.
Rotherham Council’s analysis said the increase was greater than in comparator areas and warned that long periods outside work and education at a young age can make it harder to acquire the skills needed for sustainable employment later.
More recent council performance figures have shown improvement in the proportion of younger people whose status is recorded as NEET or unknown, but the longer-term employment challenge remains.
The IPPR’s new figures concern a different age group, 18 to 24-year-olds, but they show that the difficulty does not necessarily disappear once someone moves beyond compulsory education.
Rotherham’s economy also contains a skills problem
The composition of the local labour market differs substantially from Britain as a whole.
Around 39.7 per cent of employed people in Rotherham worked in managerial, professional or associate professional occupations in the latest available survey, compared with 53.9 per cent nationally.
Rotherham had a greater proportion of employment in skilled trades, administrative work, caring occupations, manufacturing-related jobs and elementary occupations.
There is nothing inherently negative about those sectors. Many provide stable and well-paid employment.
The difficulty arises when new investment increasingly demands technical qualifications or specialist skills which local jobseekers have not had the opportunity to acquire.
Rotherham Council’s own employment strategy identifies skills, economic inactivity, deprivation and health as interlinked challenges. It says 39 per cent of Rotherham’s neighbourhood areas fall within the most deprived 10 per cent nationally for education, skills and training.
Could new investment change the picture?
There are substantial economic development plans for the Sheffield-Rotherham corridor.
In March, the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority announced a long-term Don Valley Corridor development programme stretching from Sheffield city centre through Attercliffe, Tinsley and Templeborough into Rotherham.
The authority says the 30-year programme could support 18,500 jobs, more than 10,500 homes and £1.3 billion in additional economic activity.
Those figures are forecasts for a long-term regeneration programme, rather than jobs currently available to young applicants.
Whether that investment eventually improves Rotherham’s youth opportunity figures will depend partly on what kinds of jobs are created and whether local residents can obtain the skills required to take them.
Rotherham Council says its employment services have already supported more than 1,700 residents, with 879 moving into jobs and 825 into training. It also reports the creation of 64 apprenticeships through its wider activity.
South Yorkshire’s mayoral authority also controls significant responsibilities for transport, skills and employment support across Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster.
South Yorkshire Mayor Oliver Coppard described the new Rotherham vacancy figure as a “shocking statistic” in response to the IPPR research and argued that existing local interventions would not be sufficient without improvement in the wider economy.
Rotherham is part of a much wider national problem
Rotherham sits at the most extreme end of the new index, but the research identifies a wider geographical divide.
Nine of the ten areas with the greatest availability of suitable jobs for young people were in southern England.
Other areas with comparatively low opportunity included Sheffield, Coventry, Cardiff, Broxtowe, Newcastle-under-Lyme and East Renfrewshire.
IPPR argues that the national debate around young people outside employment and education has concentrated too heavily on getting individuals ready for work without asking whether suitable jobs actually exist where they live.
The think tank is calling for changes including more individual employment support, closer coordination between health, employment and skills services, changes to apprenticeships and a proposed youth allowance within Universal Credit.
Those are policy recommendations from IPPR rather than conclusions established by the vacancy data itself.
What the figures demonstrate more directly is that a young person’s local labour market can differ enormously depending on where they happen to live.
Is Rotherham really the worst place in Britain for young people to find work?
The most accurate answer is narrower than some of the headlines surrounding the research.
According to the IPPR analysis, Rotherham had the lowest number of suitable online entry-level vacancies relative to its population of 18 to 24-year-olds among the areas examined.
That does not prove that every young person in Rotherham has worse employment prospects than every young person elsewhere.
It does not include every possible job, account perfectly for commuting or measure an individual’s qualifications and circumstances.
But Rotherham’s position is supported by several other indicators.
Young adults have a claimant rate above both the regional and national average. The borough has fewer jobs relative to its working-age population than Britain overall. The council has identified persistent problems involving skills and youth disengagement. Employers, meanwhile, report difficulty filling many of the positions which are available.
Taken together, the figures describe a labour market in which there can be both unemployed young people and employers looking for workers, while too few of the available jobs provide a realistic bridge between the two.
For Rotherham, creating jobs is therefore only part of the problem.
The harder question is whether the jobs being created are accessible to the young people who already live there.