Key points:
- In July 2025, 3.3% of UK job postings referenced casual dress, more than 10 times higher than pre-pandemic trends.
- Casual dress mentions are most common in personal care, marketing and media & communication job postings.
- Northern Ireland has the highest share of casual dress job postings at 4.7%, while London has the lowest at 2.3%.
Though tracksuits may not often be seen, many UK workplaces nowadays favour smart casual dress over traditional business attire. For employers, a relaxed dress policy can say a lot about workplace culture. And in a competitive hiring landscape, offering flexibility, even in attire, can help attract top talent.
Indeed job postings data show that mentions of casual dress surged during the pandemic and have remained high ever since. This trend is evident nationally, regionally, across most occupational groups and even globally.
Dressing down popular among UK employers
In July 2025, 3.3% of UK job postings reference casual attire, using terms like ‘casual dress’, ‘smart casual’ or ‘dress for your day’ in their job descriptions. Mentions rose sharply early in the pandemic, eventually peaking at around 4.0% in early 2023.
Although these figures might seem low, many employers — particularly in healthcare, retail and the trades — require uniforms or enforce strict dress codes, limiting the scope for individual expression.
While the pandemic contributed to this shift in workplace dress standards, it is sustained by broader social and cultural changes. These include:
- Remote work — Blurred the line between the home and workplace. Working from home has even enabled flexible dress standards (dress up for meetings with clients or key stakeholders and dress down otherwise).
- Millennials and Generation Z — The soon-to-be two largest generations in the workforce may have different style preferences and expectations, and many are now in positions of power or influence.
- Tech-sector culture — Often resistant to traditional office norms, which may be seeping into other industries, helping to normalise relaxed dress. Dressed-down tech entrepreneurs may have severed the link between clothing and success or professionalism.
From 2020 to 2023, casual dress mentions were typically higher in high-remote occupations — those where ‘remote work’ or ‘work from home’ is referenced in more than 20% of occupation postings — than in medium-remote occupations (remote share between 10 to 20%) or low-remote occupations. Still, all three segments experienced a sharp rise in mentions beginning with the pandemic.
More recently, though, low-remote occupations have tracked ahead of high-remote occupations, reflecting the prevalence of casual dress mentions among in-person roles in personal care & home health and education.
Northern Ireland leads the way; London lags behind
Northern Ireland had the highest share of postings mentioning casual dress at 4.7% in the June quarter, ahead of the North West (4.2%) and East Midlands (4.0%). London had the lowest share at just 2.3%, which may partly reflect jobs mix being strong in occupation groups like financial services (where more formal dress is likely to be expected) and tech, where casual dress is so widespread it’s rarely explicitly stated in postings.
Care, marketing and media among top occupations for casual dress
In the UK, relaxed dress standards are common across a wide variety of occupational groups. In the June quarter, 9.2% of personal care & home health postings mentioned casual dress, ahead of marketing (7.6%), media & communications (7.1%) and education & training (7.0%).
Other strong performers include the likes of community & social service (6.1%), beauty & wellness (5.8%), insurance (5.4%) and manufacturing & production (5.3%).
Casual dress policies are least likely to be mentioned in healthcare, with few opportunities for nurses, doctors or other healthcare professionals that allow for relaxed dress standards. Tech also scored relatively low, with just 2.5% of data & analytics and software development roles referencing casual dress. In tech, however, casual dress may be so entrenched in industry culture that it no longer needs to be stated in job advertisements.
Conclusion
The pandemic triggered widespread changes in how people in the UK work, impacting expectations around where and how we work, but also what we wear. The UK’s approach to workwear has become more relaxed, and job postings reflect that shift. What began during the pandemic — fueled by necessity — has persisted, reflecting generational change, remote work and evolving workplace culture.
The trend towards casual dress doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, and the prevalence of Millennials and Gen Z in positions of power or influence suggests that workplaces will increasingly reflect their values. Even if employers successfully manage to convince workers to return to the office, these trends are likely to linger.
Methodology
We identify job postings as referencing casual dress if they include general phrases such as ‘casual dress’, ‘smart casual’ or ‘dress for your day’. Twenty-six unique keywords / phrases were used to isolate casual dress job postings.
The classification of occupations into low-, middle- or high-remote was based on the occupation’s remote posting share in 2024. High-remote includes occupations where the remote posting share exceeded 20%, while low-remote are those where the share is below 10%.
The analysis on population generations defines each generation as follows:
- Silent generation: 1928 – 1945
- Baby boomers: 1946 – 1964
- Generation X: 1965 – 1979
- Millennials: 1980 – 1994
- Generation Z: 1995 – 2009
