The UK Lost Its Only Career Data API. Here's What Happened.

In October 2025, something quietly disappeared from the UK’s career guidance infrastructure. LMI for All — the only free, publicly accessible API for UK labour market information — shut down permanently.

If you have never heard of it, you are not alone. LMI for All operated in the background, powering career guidance tools, university portals, and government advisory services. It was never consumer-facing. But its closure left a gap that, as of early 2026, nobody has officially filled.

What LMI for All Was

LMI for All was funded by the Department for Education and operated by the University of Warwick’s Institute for Employment Research. It launched in 2012 with a simple mission: make UK labour market data accessible through a single, standardised API.

The API aggregated data from multiple sources — the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE), the Labour Force Survey, HMRC tax records, and several other government datasets — and exposed them through REST endpoints that developers could query by occupation, region, qualification level, and industry.

It was used by:

• National Careers Service tools and chatbots
• University careers services to show students salary and employment data
• Private career guidance platforms like Kudos, Cascaid, and others
• Local Enterprise Partnerships for regional economic planning
• Researchers and journalists investigating labour market trends

At its peak, LMI for All handled millions of API calls per year.

Why It Shut Down

The official reason was the end of its funding cycle. LMI for All depended on periodic grants from the Department for Education. When the latest funding period ended in 2025, no renewal was forthcoming.

There were also technical challenges. The API had accumulated significant technical debt over its 13-year lifespan. Data sources changed formats, new datasets emerged, and maintaining compatibility across all the upstream sources became increasingly expensive.

The result was a service that was increasingly difficult to maintain, funded by a department with shifting priorities, and used by a community that had no direct mechanism to fund its continuation.

What Was Lost

The closure of LMI for All did not just remove an API. It removed the only standardised way to programmatically access UK career data. The underlying data sources still exist — ONS still publishes ASHE, DfE still publishes LEO, the Labour Force Survey continues. But they exist as downloadable spreadsheets, CSV dumps, and statistical bulletins scattered across multiple government websites.

For a developer building a career guidance tool, the difference is enormous. With LMI for All, you could make a single API call to get the median salary for software developers in the West Midlands. Without it, you need to download a 200MB ASHE dataset, parse Excel files with inconsistent formatting, map SOC codes across different classification versions, and handle regional breakdowns manually.

For universities, the impact was immediate. Career guidance portals that embedded salary data through LMI for All widgets found their integrations broken overnight. Some switched to static data. Others removed the salary information entirely.

The Gap in the Market

As of early 2026, no direct replacement exists. The government has not announced a successor service. The University of Warwick’s team has moved on to other projects. Several commercial providers offer labour market data, but at price points that exclude most universities, small career platforms, and public sector organisations.

The career guidance sector is left in an awkward position: more data exists than ever before, but accessing it programmatically is harder than it was five years ago.

What We Built

When we started CareerMetrics, we did not set out to replace LMI for All. We set out to make UK career and salary data genuinely accessible — to individual users, to recruiters, and to universities.

But in practice, we ended up processing the same underlying datasets:

ASHE data: We downloaded and processed 11 years of ONS ASHE Table 14 data (2015-2025), covering 665 occupation codes with salary breakdowns by gender, work pattern, and percentile (10th, 25th, median, mean, 75th, 90th).

LEO data: We processed the complete Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset from the Department for Education — 28 subject areas, 135 sub-specialisations, 12 UK regions, with earnings tracked at 1, 3, 5, and 10 years after graduation.

Career path mapping: We built mappings between degree subjects, SOC occupation codes, and real salary trajectories, powered by the ASHE data.

The result is a platform that covers much of the ground LMI for All occupied, but with a consumer-facing interface on top and a B2B API for organisations that need programmatic access.

For Universities

The closure of LMI for All hit university careers services hardest. Many had built their guidance tools on top of it. We built CareerMetrics’ university features specifically to fill this gap:

• Embeddable widgets that can be dropped into any university website or VLE, showing salary data by subject
• LTI 1.3 integration for direct embedding in Moodle, Canvas, and Blackboard
• Career pathways data mapping degree subjects to likely occupations and salary trajectories
• An API for universities that need to integrate salary data into their own systems

If your careers service relied on LMI for All and you are looking for an alternative, get in touch.

The Broader Problem

The LMI for All shutdown highlights a recurring issue in UK public data infrastructure: useful services get built, gain adoption, lose funding, and disappear. The data itself persists in government archives, but the tooling that makes it usable evaporates.

This is not unique to career data. It happens across open data, public APIs, and government digital services. The pattern is predictable: build, fund for a period, underfund, neglect, close.

The lesson for anyone building on government data is simple: do not assume the convenience layer will persist. If you need the data, process it yourself. Own the pipeline. Do not depend on a funded project that could lose its funding.

That is essentially what we did with CareerMetrics, and it is why the platform can exist independently of any single government service or API.

What Comes Next

The UK still has world-class labour market data. ASHE is one of the most detailed salary surveys on the planet. LEO is genuinely unique — no other country links education records to tax records at this scale. The raw material is exceptional.

What is missing is the infrastructure to make it usable. LMI for All was that infrastructure for over a decade. Something needs to fill the gap — whether that is a government successor, a community effort, or commercial platforms like ours.

The data is too good to leave locked in spreadsheets.