ABSTRACT
This article examines how the relationship between employment and migrants’ subjective well-being (SWB) varies according to their initial reason for migration: work, study, family or asylum. We argue that employment does not affect all migrants’ well-being in the same way and use the UK Annual Population Survey (2012–2022) to provide novel empirical evidence on this issue. First, we find that employment is positively associated with the SWB of work, study, and asylum migrants, but not of family migrants. This difference for family migrants is consistent with unique gendered barriers to their employment in the country. Second, the expected decline in the strength of the association between employment and SWB with length of residence is only partially observed. Study migrants show stronger associations between employment and SWB over time, which may be linked to particularly precarious transition from study to work visas that many migrants experience in the UK and in broader migration contexts. Building on these findings, we draw conceptual insights by linking these patterns to overlapping social and structural mechanisms—including labour-market conditionality, legal precarity, and domestic responsibilities—that likely sustain the observed relations between migrants’ work and well-being. Together, the findings provide evidence to guide policy debates on migrants’ access to, and dependence on, employment in destination countries.