Gender, age, ethnicity, and turnover statistics revealed for UK print

The British Printing Industries Federation (BPIF) has released findings it has gathered about the estimated gender, age, and ethnicity breakdown of the print industry alongside other descriptive statistics.

In its report, the BPIF described the difficulty it had in gathering relevant, detailed, and accurate data that is entirely specific to the printing industry.

However, with time and by cross-referencing data from The Office for National Statistics, the printing federation was able to build what it has labelled as “best estimates” that can help to depict the landscape of the industry.

From a wider perspective, structural data for the UK industry suggests that turnover was £13.7bn in 2024, with 6,800 companies employing 93,000 people.

According to the federation, 75% of UK print companies in 2024 employed less than ten people, and only 50 companies had 250 or more employees.

Just over one-third of companies (36%) had a turnover less than £100,000, and 5% of companies had a turnover in excess of £5m. The BPIF estimates that this 5% of companies accounts for around 75% of total industry turnover.

The age profile of companies shows that in 2024 almost two-thirds of companies in the industry were at least ten years old.  However, 9% of companies were formed within the last two years.

Drilling into more precise details about demographics, the entire UK working population in 2024 was 51% male, and 49% female. Printing, by comparison, is 70% male, and 30% female according to BPIF’s figures, though this aligns more closely to the general manufacturing industry which is currently 72% male, and 28% female.

The age of the printing workforce, currently a hot topic within the industry, was also put under the microscope. The average age of the UK working population over 16 in 2024 is 42.3, while the

average age of the printing industry in 2024 was calculated at 43.4.

While the printing industry is therefore marginally older than the overall average, it has actually aged slightly less in the last ten years than the average. In 2014, the average overall worker was 41.5 (0.8 years younger than now), while the average worker in print specifically was 43.0 (0.4 years younger).

In terms of ethnicity, 84.0% of the total UK workforce is categorised as White. Comparatively, the printing industry is 88.2% White, according to the BPIF report.

There is a corresponding slight under-representation of most other ethnic groups in UK print: 2.6% of the industry is Black (compared to a working average of 4.4%), 1.4% is Mixed (compared to 1.6%), 1.2% is Pakistani (compared to 1.5%), and 1.0% classed as ‘Other Asian’ (compared to 1.4%).

The only minority group marginally overrepresented in UK print, according to the BPIF’s statistics, is Indian, which represents 3.9% of the UK print population in comparison to a working average of 3.8%.

The Printing ethnicity data has been estimated from available data for the wider manufacturing industry, with better data specific to printing not yet uncovered.

BPIF members can access the full report on the federation’s website.