The Rhino Report – September 2026

Welcome to this month's Rhino Report. September brings a lot to get through: billions being pumped into housing, nuclear, defence and data centres, and the growing scrum for the skilled people needed to actually build any of it.

We're also looking at why this year's pay rises aren't stretching as far as they should, what's happening to graduate jobs (nothing good), what British workers are actually getting disciplined for at work (also nothing good, but at least it's funny), and why permanent hiring is still dragging its feet even as recruiters start feeling more upbeat.

All this and more below.

Your Payslip Says 3.5%. Your Weekly Shop Disagrees.

Employees' regular pay grew 3.5% in the year to April to June 2026, which sounds like the kind of number worth mentioning to your boss. Adjusted for inflation, it comes to real growth of just 0.5%. Strip out the public sector, where pay rose 6.1% partly because of when this year's NHS awards landed, and private-sector regular pay grew only 2.8%, according to the ONS. For most people working outside the public sector, this year's pay rise has barely kept pace with the cost of getting to work in the first place, which rather defeats the point of having one.

That has a fairly direct effect on how loyalty gets rewarded. Staying with one employer for years still buys goodwill, familiarity and a manager who already knows better than to book you in for anything before 9am. It doesn't automatically buy you the market rate. Businesses hiring externally can offer a stronger salary to secure someone with in-demand experience, while the same business's existing team quietly falls behind on a steady diet of below-inflation annual reviews. Plenty of people we speak to are surprised, not annoyed, to learn how far the market has actually moved since they last checked theirs.

One thing working in candidates' favour is that it's becoming easier to check. Salary disclosure on job adverts reached 49.7% of postings in the second quarter of the year, up from 46.3% a year earlier, and the number of private-sector adverts showing a salary jumped 58.5% year on year, according to CV-Library's analysis of Lightcast data. Half the market still won't tell you what a role pays before you apply for it, presumably on the theory that surprise is a valid part of the interview process. But for the first time, more than half will, and that alone makes benchmarking your own package a considerably less mysterious exercise than it used to be.

Graduate Jobs Have Just Hit Their Lowest Level On Record. Applications Haven't.

If you want one number that captures how tough entry-level hiring has become, Adzuna supplied it on 24 August: just 8,383 graduate vacancies were advertised in July, down 45% on the same month last year and the lowest total since the company started tracking graduate jobs in 2016. Back in 2017, there were more than 55,000. Andrew Hunter, Adzuna's co-founder, was blunt about it: “employers still haven't found a reason to open up hiring” for people straight out of university, and the annual decline actually got worse in July rather than easing off, the first time that's happened since January.

The awkward part is what's waiting on the other side of the gate. A record 262,820 eighteen-year-olds are heading off to university this September, most of them presumably hoping the graduate job will still be there in three years' time. Jobseekers per graduate vacancy have already climbed to 2.14, up from 1.93 a year earlier, and the number of 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training has passed one million. Employers facing higher National Insurance and minimum wage bills are, understandably, thinking harder before adding junior headcount, and some are quietly prioritising automation instead. Not every sector is retreating, though: travel, teaching, construction and manufacturing all added graduate roles over the summer, and it's not a coincidence that most of those are the same industries already competing hardest for experienced people too.

What Actually Gets People Sacked. It's Rarer Than You'd Think.

Every so often the more serious parts of the labour market produce a statistic that's actually worth a laugh rather than a wince. In August, Acas published a representative YouGov survey of 1,050 British employers asking what conduct had actually led to disciplinary action at their business. Not turning up to work came top, cited by 34%, which suggests the classic sick-day excuse is alive and well and fooling absolutely nobody. Theft, bullying and simple rudeness to colleagues or customers were tied at 30% each. Suspected fake sick leave came in at 27%, being drunk at work at 23%, and an office romance at a comparatively restrained 11%. Dress-code breaches limped in last at 9%, which suggests most British workplaces have more pressing concerns than what anyone's wearing.

None of this is a viral anecdote dressed up as a trend. It's a properly representative poll, and Acas is currently consulting on revisions to its disciplinary and grievance code until 23 September, so there's a reasonable chance some of this list gets a little longer, or a little shorter, by the time anyone reads about it again.

Britain Is About To Ask The Same Engineers To Build Its Submarines, Its Homes And Its Data Centres

While the wider market shuffles forward with all the enthusiasm of someone queuing to renew a passport, a handful of very large numbers are quietly converging on a very small pool of people. Defence spending accelerated sharply through July, including an £8.4 billion investment in the Dreadnought submarine programme that government says will help take the Defence Nuclear Enterprise from around 47,000 jobs to 65,000 by 2030. Nuclear wants tens of thousands more workers of its own. Housing has just had nearly £10 billion allocated from a ten-year, £39 billion affordable homes programme. And data centres are pulling hard enough on the electricity grid that Ofgem's connection queue has more than tripled in under a year.

These don't read like the same story until you ask who actually builds any of it. Skills England's latest sector analysis found that 19 of advanced manufacturing's 25 priority occupations also sit on another sector's priority list, most often clean energy, defence and digital infrastructure, and that defence shares 9 of its own 14 priority occupations with advanced manufacturing. Electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, project engineers, technicians, welders and fitters aren't just in demand across several of Britain's biggest spending programmes. They're in demand from all of them, at once, rather like guests who've somehow been invited to three weddings on the same Saturday. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority puts it about as plainly as an official strategy document ever does, naming “new nuclear and continued investment in defence increasing competition for key skills” as a risk to its own workforce.

There's a quieter version of the same problem sitting in Suffolk. In July, government agreed to extend Sizewell B's operating life to 2055, twenty years longer than expected, protecting around 900 skilled nuclear jobs. That's good news for the people who work there, and mildly inconvenient, in a roundabout way, for everyone trying to staff Sizewell C, Wylfa or the wider decommissioning programme, because those 900 experienced people were part of the pool those projects were quietly counting on becoming available. It's a rare kind of shortage: getting worse not because someone lost a job, but because someone didn't.

Construction has its own version of the squeeze, and it cuts the other way. On 25 August, government confirmed the first wave of allocations from that £39 billion housing programme, including a fund set aside purely to rebuild councils' own capacity to deliver homes. That detail is telling on its own. Government can allocate capital far faster than the market can grow back experienced site managers, quantity surveyors and subcontractors, and construction remained the industry with the highest number of company insolvencies in England and Wales over the twelve months to July. A large order book doesn't build a house by itself, whatever a spreadsheet in Whitehall might imply. People and viable suppliers do, and both were already stretched before this money arrived.

It's exactly the kind of squeeze we deal with regularly in mechanical engineering and construction recruitment, and it's why scaling an engineering team quickly has become less about the size of the salary on offer and more about how fast a business can actually move once it's found the right person, ideally before defence, nuclear or a data centre developer finds them first. There is at least one genuine piece of good news underneath all this. From 1 August, apprenticeship training became fully funded for eligible under-25s, and from October, qualifying small employers can claim up to £2,000 towards taking one on. It won't produce an experienced engineer overnight. It might, over a few years, produce a few more of the people every one of these programmes is quietly competing for.

Temporary Jobs Are Leading This Recovery. Permanent Jobs Are Still Deciding.

Two numbers landed in the same fortnight this August, and they don't quite agree with each other. On 10 August, the KPMG and REC UK Report on Jobs announced that permanent placements had finally stopped falling, ending a slump that had run for 45 consecutive months, roughly since the market turned sour at the end of 2022. Eight days later, the Office for National Statistics published its own count and confirmed UK vacancies had slipped to 707,000, the lowest total outside the pandemic since 2014.

Both figures are accurate. Neither is the whole story on its own, which feels like a very British way for a recovery to begin: quietly, and with somebody immediately pointing out the flaws.

Look past the permanent-placement headline and the actual hero of the story is temporary work, which has spent most of the last four years being treated as recruitment's consolation prize. Temp billings rose for a fourth consecutive month in July, growing at close to their fastest rate in three years, and temporary vacancies increased for the first time in two years. Permanent hiring, by contrast, only stopped shrinking. Think of it less as a recovery and more as employers finally agreeing to stop apologising for not hiring.

That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. CIPD's latest employer survey found only 57% of private-sector businesses plan to recruit at all in the next three months, and describes the wider mood as “low-hire, low-fire”, which is corporate-speak for “we're not really doing anything, but we'd like credit for the restraint.” Vacancies falling to 707,000, with 2.5 unemployed people for every one of them in April to June, sits comfortably alongside that caution. Employers appear willing to bring people in. They are simply not yet willing to promise those people a permanent future.

We're seeing the same pattern in the roles we recruit for. Businesses that would have signed off a permanent hire eighteen months ago are asking for contract or interim cover instead, not because the work has disappeared, but because nobody wants to be the one who signed off a permanent salary two months before conditions turn again. It's a reasonable instinct, even if it does let the finance director feel cautious and clever at the same time. It also means the first extra opportunities to appear this autumn are more likely to be temporary, project-based or fixed-term than advertised as permanent from day one.

That appetite for flexibility is about to collide with a government trying to regulate it out of workers' lives. A consultation on guaranteed hours, minimum shift notice and compensation for late-cancelled shifts closed on 25 August, and CIPD research found around two-thirds of affected employers expect the changes to raise their costs, with nearly half calling the rules difficult to implement. The policy is meant to give zero-hours and low-hours workers more security. Some employers appear to have read that as a challenge, and are reportedly considering the traditional response: buying that flexibility somewhere else instead, through agency labour or self-employed contractors who sit outside the new rules entirely. It's the workplace equivalent of being told to tidy your room and building an extension instead. For sectors that lean heavily on flexible or hourly staffing, that's worth watching closely over the next few months.

National statistics can tell you whether vacancies are rising or falling. They can't tell an individual business whether its next hire will be easy, and they certainly won't warn a data-centre developer, a submarine programme and a housing association that they're all quietly trying to poach the same electrical engineer this autumn. That's the thread running through most of what's happened since the last edition: flexibility, pay and skilled labour are all being renegotiated at once, and whichever side of the table you're sitting at, September is a reasonable moment to work out what you're actually negotiating for.

See you next month.