The 20 best places to work for graduates in the UK
The Times has published its Top 100 Graduate Employers survey for 2025, detailing the best places for graduates to work in the UK.
The ranking is based on interviews with over 15,000 final year students at 30 UK universities. The research examined students’ experiences during their search for a first graduate job and asked them about their attitudes to employers.
The question used to produce the Top 100 rankings was “Which employer do you think offers the best opportunities for graduates?”. The question was deliberately open-ended and students were not shown a list of employers to choose from or prompted during the interview.
The wide selection of answers given during the research shows that final year students used very different criteria to decide which employer offered the best opportunities for graduates.
Some evaluated employers based on the quality of the recruitment promotions they’d seen whilst at university – either online or in-person – or their recent experiences during the application and graduate selection process.
Other final year students focused on the ‘graduate employment proposition’ as their main guide – the quality of training and development an employer offers, the starting salary and remuneration package available, and the practical aspects of a first graduate job, such as its location or the likely working hours.
Civil service leads the way
In a dramatic twist, the Civil Service has returned to number one in this year’s rankings, after two years in second place. Best-known for its prestigious Fast Stream programme, this is the sixth time the Civil Service has been named as the UK’s leading graduate employer and a total of 6.7% of final year students from the ‘Class of 2025’ voted for the organisation.
The accounting & professional services firm PwC has moved down to second place, having been the country’s top graduate employer in both 2023 and 2024. The firm holds the unsurpassed record of being voted number one seventeen times in the 27 year history of the Top 100.
The NHS, the accounting & professional services firm Deloitte, and the BBC are each unchanged in third, fourth and fifth places respectively. JPMorganChase moves up for the third year running, this time to sixth place, the highest-ever position for an investment bank in the Top 100.
EY slips back one place, just ahead of Google, which remains in eighth place, its lowest position for a decade.
The consumer goods company L’Oréal jumps an impressive ten places, to reach the top ten for the for first time. And banking giant HSBC climbs to tenth place, its highest ranking for eighteen years.
