Research and analysis

Foreword, Executive summary

Published 18 December 2025

Presented to Parliament pursuant to section 8B(6) of the Life Chances Act 2010

About the Commission

The Social Mobility Commission is an independent advisory non-departmental public body established under the Life Chances Act 2010 as modified by the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016. It has a duty to assess progress in improving social mobility in the UK and to promote social mobility in England. The Commission board comprises:

Chair

• Alun Francis OBE, Chief Executive of Blackpool and The Fylde College.

Deputy Chairs

• Resham Kotecha, Global Head of Policy at the Open Data Institute.
• Rob Wilson, Chairman and non-executive director across public, private and third sectors.

Commissioners

• Dr Raghib Ali, Senior Clinical Research Associate at the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge.
• Ryan Henson, Chief Executive Officer at the Coalition for Global Prosperity.
• Parminder Kohli, Chair, Shell UK Ltd, and Shell Group, Executive Vice President, Sustainability and Carbon.
• Tina Stowell MBE, The Rt Hon Baroness Stowell of Beeston.

Acknowledgements

This report was written with contributions from the following people: Anthony Heath – Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College, University of Oxford and Dr Yang Yu – Research Officer of the Centre for Social Investigation at Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Foreword

We are pleased to launch the 2025 State of the Nation report, fulfilling the Commission’s statutory responsibility to report to Parliament on the condition of social mobility in the UK. This year also marks the 15th anniversary of the Child Poverty and Life Chances Act (2010), the legislation from which the Commission traces its origins.

This report should be read in the context of our work over the past 4 years. We began with a concern that the evidence on actual social mobility in the United Kingdom had not featured sufficiently in policy debates. Too often it is simply asserted that social mobility is in crisis, is declining, or compares badly with other countries. The evidence tells a far more nuanced story.

Our State of the Nation reports have provided an opportunity to present a coherent, consistent approach to monitoring social mobility, based on a robust and reliable body of evidence. In 2022, we introduced the Social Mobility Index to capture the 40 most reliable indicators across the drivers, intermediate and long‑term outcomes of social mobility. In 2023, we added to this by breaking data down by demographics, including protected characteristics. In 2024, we added much more detailed geographical breakdowns by examining data at local authority level.

State of the Nation 2025 extends our analysis into 2 new areas: it collates evidence on historical performance and presents outcomes compared to other countries. This evidence shows a detailed picture, which defies simple caricatures. One clear conclusion is that the UK is neither terrible nor brilliant at social mobility. We have some areas which have improved, some strengths and some weaknesses. If we had an international league table, our country would come somewhere in the middle.

There are 2 areas of our previous analysis which State of the Nation strongly reinforces. The first relates to the changes in the labour market and the creation of more higher-skilled occupations. This challenge must now be considered with technological change and AI at the centre of our thinking. Such developments will almost certainly have significant disruptive effects, but will also create new opportunities, changing the landscape we have become used to. The second relates to the long-term, deep-rooted nature of regional disparities – which we have argued is the fundamental challenge, economically and socially, in the UK. We will be coming back to these challenges in our future work.

In the meantime, State of the Nation 2025 throws out another important challenge for social mobility policy. By comparing our performance with the past and with other countries, it compels us to think hard about why we believe the UK has a social mobility problem and what exactly we think this problem is. Time and again it is taken as a given that performance is declining or is inferior compared to other countries and improvement is urged, but without a clear view of the end game. How do we know when social mobility in the UK is ‘good’? Is it when we perform better than our neighbours? Or is there some other measure? These are questions that have been neglected in the debate.

In the absence of clear targets and goals, the debate often defaults to an oversimplified ‘equality of outcome’ approach, which relies on identifying disparities in outcomes between groups and an assumption that they should be equalised. Disparity analysis can be helpful, but it also has substantial limitations. Much depends on the definition of the groups and differences in outcomes may be explained by a range of reasons, not all of which are ‘unfair’. A focus purely on closing outcome gaps can lead to unforeseen consequences and complications which may simply replace one ‘problem’ with others.

This methodology has been, and still is, strongly present in much thinking about social mobility policy. It underpins the focus on the ‘lucky few’ model of upward mobility, which this Social Mobility Commission has been keen to challenge. This is because it focuses far too narrowly on equality within elite groups, with increasing attention to detail (because it is easy to keep on finding new disparities) while ignoring the wider differences and disparities beyond that focal point. To be blunt, too much attention has been spent on improving the outcomes for a small number of people from lower socio-economic backgrounds who can get into elite occupations, and on tracking the proportions of people within these elites from different backgrounds. Far less attention has been spent on what social mobility means for everyone else.   

Too much effort to improve social mobility has therefore been directed at the wrong problem. To use the technical term, it is focused on relative occupational mobility. But this is not where we are performing badly, either historically or compared to others. 

There are social mobility trends which do appear more problematic. One simple measure is whether children, when they reach adulthood, earn more than their parents. The evidence here suggests that there is ‘stickiness’ and it is most marked among the bottom and the top. This has become more marked since the 2008 financial crisis, falling from 60 to 65% before the crash to just 44% since 2010.^{[footnote 1]} This has also been a period of stagnating absolute incomes, changes in the labour market relating to the supply of higher‑level occupations (‘room at the top’ growing more slowly); and increased pressure in the housing market. This is one aspect of a wider phenomenon whereby the younger generation appear to have more restricted opportunities than their parents, unless they have access to inherited rather than earned wealth. At the same time, geographical disparities in economic wealth and opportunity, along with educational, health and a range of other outcomes, have become increasingly clear cut. 

On this basis, we believe that promoting social mobility is still a vital aim, but only if it is redefined and considered in a different way. Our starting point is that social mobility is fundamentally about improvements in our overall collective prosperity. This is why we place such a focus on the economy, innovation and wealth creation across the country. It is also about how this can be done in ways which extend opportunity as widely as possible. This gives us our strong focus on geography, but also means that the traditional big themes of social mobility policy – early years and education – remain within our priorities. They are, however, viewed in a wider way. Instead of focusing the entire system on supplying the needs of elite professions within a narrow set of sectors, there is a need to refocus on the skills, knowledge and behaviours needed to support innovation, growth and enterprise. This means a focus on place and on the real obstacles to opportunity in different areas, along with the family, community, neighbourhood and cultural aspects of these.

We set out our overall approach in Innovation Generation (December 2024), where we argued that place-based approaches, supporting but also challenging the current trajectory of devolution, offer the best route to improving opportunity and delivering social mobility relevant to the whole country.

Each year, the State of the Nation report has built the strength and depth of our understanding of social mobility in the UK. We are using these insights to build a body of work and our recent publications from our Economic Growth and Investment Group and Regional Insights set out how we can better address social mobility through a place-based approach.

Alun Francis,

Chair of the Social Mobility Commission

Executive summary

The Social Mobility Commission is a statutory advisory body that reports on social mobility across the UK and makes recommendations relating to England. Every year, we report to Parliament on the current state of social mobility. To improve reporting, we developed our Social Mobility Index, the most comprehensive summary of social mobility statistics in the UK. Over the past year, we have continued to enhance and update the Index, and this report shares our latest results.

The 2025 State of the Nation report provides the most comprehensive annual analysis of social mobility in the UK. Its strength lies in combining international comparisons with long-term tracking of trends, using our Index, which covers occupation, income, education, housing and wealth. Policymakers, researchers and stakeholders will find this report especially useful for understanding the current state of social mobility and identifying effective ways to deal with persistent inequalities.

The UK has similar levels of absolute occupational mobility to other major western European countries, but faces some worrying trends with decreasing upward income mobility and worsening housing mobility. Poor growth in real wages and increasing house prices are probably responsible for much of this.^{[footnote 2]} Relative occupational mobility studies provide mixed findings; some see the UK as fairly mobile, while others place it in a more average position.^{[footnote 3]} Despite these differences, all studies highlight significant opportunities for improvement.

In terms of absolute income mobility, the UK performs well compared with Canada, Denmark and the USA, but faces a concerning decline over time. New generations are increasingly unlikely to earn more than their parents did at a similar age. Relative income mobility in the UK is not as good, consistently ranking near the USA, among the least mobile developed nations. By contrast, countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Nordic states achieve higher levels of relative income mobility, pointing to the potential for valuable policy lessons.

Educational mobility presents a complex picture internationally. The UK is placed among countries where people have a good chance of upward educational mobility (like Belgium, France and Japan) but still faces fairly strong intergenerational links, meaning a child’s education level heavily depends on their parents’ background. Housing mobility data (based on renting versus owning a home) is less comprehensive, but available evidence clearly shows a sharp decline in the UK’s housing mobility in recent years. The positive impacts of policies like the Right to Buy scheme from the 1980s have greatly diminished, restricting mobility opportunities today. Wealth mobility is another crucial area where data is unfortunately limited, highlighting a critical need for improved research and information.

Within the UK, extreme regional differences persist. Areas that once thrived through industries such as mining and manufacturing – particularly in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber, the West Midlands, Wales and Scotland – continue to experience significant disadvantage, showing little improvement since the early 2000s. It is likely that these areas are still suffering the after-effects of the de‑industrialisation of the 1980s. Meanwhile, prosperous areas in London and surrounding regions consistently provide better conditions for social mobility. Rural areas face distinct challenges, including limited access to educational institutions and skilled jobs, which further deepens existing inequalities.

Intermediate outcomes, indicators that predict future mobility potential, confirm and reinforce these regional differences. The educational achievement gap, which had narrowed at age 11 and 16 years, widened during the COVID-19 pandemic and has shown little sign of closing. Additionally, disadvantaged students increasingly fall behind in higher education (HE) attainment. Despite improved employment opportunities for young people overall, significant socio-economic gaps remain in accessing professional and managerial roles.

Going on to HE still generally leads to better earnings, but recent minimum wage increases have narrowed this advantage. This suggests that, increasingly, we need more than better education to improve life chances for everyone – fair economic opportunities at all education and skill levels, and in all places, are critical.

1. Jo Blanden and others, ‘Trends in Intergenerational Home Ownership and Wealth Transmission’, 2021. Published on CEP.LSE.AC.UK ↩

2. ‘Real wages’ means wage statistics that have been adjusted for inflation, so they can be compared over time. For example, if nominal (unadjusted) wages grow by 4% at a time when inflation was also 4%, there has been no growth in real wages.   ↩

3. Relative mobility measures compare the chances that people from different backgrounds have of reaching a particular outcome. ↩