Photo: Sandy Gerrard · CC BY-SA 2.0Great Bircham draws workers in: 2.1 jobs for every resident in work
172 people travel into the village for work each working day. There is no Jobs & income Grade for Great Bircham. 3.4% of people of working age are on jobless benefits, against 2.7% in the typical UK town.
Great Bircham and work: the main findings
A local job centre
175 jobs are based in Great Bircham for 82 working residents; the typical UK town has 0.7 jobs per resident in work. Restaurants, cafés and pubs, hotels and holiday accommodation and shops make up 49% of them. Jobs based here ↓
More benefit claims than most towns
The typical UK town: 2.7%; England and Wales: 4% so far in 2026. Claims across the King's Lynn and West Norfolk council area have run below the national rate every month since 2015. Benefits over time ↓
Written from the data on this page: ONS Census 2021 and BRES, DWP claimant counts via Nomis, and ONS household income.
175 jobs, 37% in hotels, pubs and restaurants
BRES counts jobs, not people (a part-time job and a second job count once each), so it runs above the Census count of people working here (213). Small areas are shared out to the town by where their Census 2021 workers were based; kinds of work are BRES industry divisions (SIC 2007), rounded. England’s towns: all jobs in its built-up areas.
Jobs at workplaces in Great Bircham (employees and working owners, ONS Business Register and Employment Survey 2024).
Jobless claims in the King's Lynn and West Norfolk council area have run below England and Wales every month since 2015
King's Lynn and West Norfolk’s rate was about 1.7% in 2019, peaked at 5.3% in May 2020 and has averaged 3% in 2026, against 4% across England and Wales. Claims everywhere stay higher than before the pandemic, partly because Universal Credit counts more people on low pay as looking for work.
The chart is the whole council area of King's Lynn and West Norfolk, which Nomis publishes monthly; the figures above the line are for Great Bircham’s built-up area. Claimant count: people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, or Universal Credit while required to look for work. Employment deprivation counts people out of work on Jobseeker’s Allowance, Employment and Support Allowance, Incapacity Benefit, Severe Disablement Allowance, Carer’s Allowance or the Universal Credit equivalents (English Indices of Deprivation 2025). The “most deprived tenth” compares areas within England only.
Claimant rate since 2015: people claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance or Universal Credit while looking for work, as a share of residents aged 16 to 64 (DWP, via Nomis).
Great Bircham’s workers come from King's Lynn to Fakenham
- Countryside30
- King's Lynn28
- Heacham12
- Snettisham10
- Fakenham7
- Dersingham7
- Hunstanton7
- Terrington St Clement5
- Bircham Newton5
- Grimston4
- Countryside13
- King's Lynn11
- Ely3
- Hunstanton3
- Fakenham2
- Cambridge1
- Marham1
- Swaffham1
- Wisbech1
- Norwich1
King's Lynn, 11 miles away, sends 28 people, more than any other town; in all, 81% of the people who work in Great Bircham live outside it. Going the other way, King's Lynn is the biggest single destination (11).
The ten places that send the most workers into Great Bircham, and the ten where its residents most often work (Census 2021, by home and workplace). Line width is the number of people.
Before tax, households in Great Bircham average £48,401
Higher than 36% of UK towns of 2,500+; the typical town is £52,385. The whole council area of King's Lynn and West Norfolk averages £47,345.
The town figure is ONS’s neighbourhood (MSOA) estimates shared out by where the town’s residents live.
Total household income before tax, mean, year to March 2023 (ONS small-area estimates).
Neighbouring places to Great Bircham, compared
| Town | People | Jobs | Work in own town | Claimants | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Great Bircham | 213 | 175 | — | 3.4% | — |
| Dersingham | 4,753 | 775 | 12% | 1.9% | C |
| Snettisham | 2,709 | 528 | 7% | 2.9% | D |
| Heacham | 3,978 | 1,071 | 20% | 3% | D |
| Hunstanton | 4,230 | 1,801 | 28% | 3.8% | D− |
| Gayton | 1,522 | 256 | 5% | 2.5% | C− |
| Fakenham | 8,390 | 4,833 | 43% | 3.4% | D |
| King's Lynn | 47,604 | 27,300 | 54% | 4.1% | C− |
Jobs based in each place, commuters who stay in their own town, and the claimant rate.
What this data can and can’t tell you
- The Census was taken in lockdown. Census day was 21 March 2021, during the third national lockdown: many people were furloughed or working from home, so fewer travelled to work, and journeys were shorter, than before the pandemic or since. The flows on this page show where people worked that spring.
- At home and no fixed place are one figure. In the workplace flows, ONS puts people who mainly worked at home and people with no fixed workplace (drivers, builders, care workers on rounds) at their home address, so the two can’t be told apart there.
- Towns are built-up areas. Great Bircham here is ONS’s built-up area: the town as built, not its council district. A workplace on an estate or farm outside every built-up area counts as “outside any built-up area”.
- Jobs are counted where they are. BRES counts jobs at each workplace (employees and working owners, rounded by ONS), so a town with a hospital, university or big employer can have more jobs than working residents. Small areas are shared out to towns by where their Census workers were based.
- The benefits chart is the council area. Nomis publishes the claimant count monthly for councils back to 2013, so the line is King's Lynn and West Norfolk as a whole; the claimant rate elsewhere on this page is Great Bircham’s built-up area, from small areas.
Questions about work in Great Bircham
How many people commute into Great Bircham?
172 people who lived elsewhere worked in Great Bircham at the 2021 Census, 81% of its 213 workers. The most came from King's Lynn (28), Heacham (12) and Snettisham (10). 41 residents travelled out the other way.
How many jobs are there in Great Bircham?
About 180 jobs (employees and working owners) were based in Great Bircham in 2024, on ONS’s Business Register and Employment Survey: 2.1 for every resident in work, against 0.7 in the typical UK town.
What is the average household income in Great Bircham?
Mean household income before tax was £48,401 in the year to March 2023 (ONS), against £52,385 in the typical UK town.
Sources: ONS Census 2021 origin-destination data, place of work (ODWP01EW), output areas summed to the ONS 2022 built-up area · ONS Census 2021 tables TS058 (distance), TS061 (method of travel), TS063 (occupation) and TS066 (economic activity) · ONS Business Register and Employment Survey via Nomis (open access), by industry division · ONS small-area income estimates (financial year ending 2023); House of Commons Library MSOA names · DWP claimant count via Nomis (towns January to August 2026; councils, regions and England and Wales monthly since January 2015) · MHCLG English Indices of Deprivation 2025 · DfT Transport Connectivity Metric (employment) · TownRatings grades: our own summary of the data, ranked against UK towns only. All under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Contains HM Land Registry data © Crown copyright and database right 2026. Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2026 (ONS boundaries). Northern Ireland: Source: NISRA; contains Land & Property Services data and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland information, © Crown copyright, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Scotland: contains National Records of Scotland data, Registers of Scotland data and SEPA data, © Crown copyright / © SEPA 2025, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.