Economy statistics
View economy statistics:
Aberdeenshire's economy
Aberdeenshire’s Labour Market Profile provides the latest information on employment, unemployment, occupations and labour demand amongst other useful data.
Aberdeenshire Local Statistics provides information about various local indicators such as health, education and economy and how the council area compares to others in the UK.
Claimant Count is a commonly used measure of unemployment and counts all people aged 16-64 who claim unemployment benefits. This interactive report provides data for Aberdeenshire from 2018 onwards. The report presents figures in two ways: the total number of people who claim unemployment benefits, and what proportion of the working age population these claimants represent. You can explore the data and break it down by administrative area, electoral wards, year, age and sex and comparisons can be made.
Towns and areas statistics provide facts and figures at an Aberdeenshire and administrative area level, and for 19 main towns. It also includes statistics about each of Aberdeenshire’s intermediate zones.
Deprivation
The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) is the Scottish Government’s official tool for identifying small areas of deprivation across Scotland. The 2020 SIMD was released on 28th January 2020 and is the latest publication. The next SIMD is not expected until 2026.
The SIMD measures deprivation for data zones in 7 different categories:
- Income
- Employment
- Health
- Education
- Housing
- Geographic access to services
- Crime
These are then combined to give each data zone an overall SIMD score and ranked to allow for comparison across different parts of Scotland.
A summary of the results for Aberdeenshire are available in the Aberdeenshire 2020 SIMD Briefing Note (PDF 143KB) and 2020 SIMD Aberdeenshire Ranking (XLSX 3.1MB). Guidance on how to use the SIMD is provided in our 2020 SIMD Toolkit (PDF 1.35MB). View interactive mapping of the SIMD 2020 for the whole of Scotland.
Earlier SIMD data
View previous Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation reports.
Employment land and industrial estates
The Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Business and Industry Land Audit 2023 (PDF 2MB) provides information on the supply and availability of employment land for business and industry uses in Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire. It gives details of how much of the land in each local authority area is marketable, immediately available, under construction or constrained and shows the annual take up of land which has been built out.
The Aberdeenshire business and industrial areas guide 2024 provides an overview of Aberdeenshire’s main business parks and industrial estates, including information on the occupancy/vacancy, industry type, and location. Survey work to complete the guide was undertaken in summer 2024.
The Employment Land Prospectus identifies longer-term available land sites that are allocated in the Aberdeenshire Local Development Plan 2023.
Income
Household Income Bulletin 2025 (PDF 1.75MB) gives average and lower quartile household income for towns and villages in Aberdeenshire and looks at change over the last five years.
Contact
If you can’t find what you are looking for or would like further information on any of the topics covered, please get in touch by emailing statistics@aberdeenshire.gov.uk.