Adult social care
Adult social worker jobs
Assessing what an adult needs, arranging support and carrying safeguarding responsibilities, usually in a council team.
This page is the guide. The 151 area pages below carry the published figures for each local authority, and the adverts live on this site right now.
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Adult social worker jobs across the UK
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Open adverts for Adult social worker jobs across the UK, as a plain list
What the published data covers
Adding up the published local figures across the 151 areas with data gives 21,335 on the measure this role is indexed by, which is social worker, filled posts. The middle area records 100. That is arithmetic over local releases, not a national statistic, and areas the publisher withholds are simply absent from it.
The largest are Derbyshire at 650, Essex at 550, Norfolk at 550, Lancashire at 475, Suffolk at 450. Coverage runs across 9 regions of England.
For national context, Skills for Care reported an adult social care vacancy rate of 6.2%, about 96,000 posts, in the year to March 2026, down from 7% and the lowest since 2015-16, against a whole-economy rate of 2.2%. Source: Skills for Care, reported by Community Care and National Health Executive, 2026. The area figures above are from the ASC-WDS local release for 2024/25.
Social worker (adults): the full picture
Teams and caseloads
Councils organise adult teams in different ways: locality teams, hospital discharge, mental health under section 75 arrangements, learning disability, and safeguarding hubs. The work is recognisably the same and the pace is not.
Hospital teams run to discharge deadlines. Locality teams carry longer relationships and heavier review backlogs. Ask about caseload size, duty frequency and how supervision is protected, because those three set the job.
Registration and post-qualifying routes
Social Work England registration is essential and renews annually with recorded continuing professional development. Newly qualified workers go through the assessed and supported year in employment, which should come with a protected caseload.
Beyond that the recognised routes are Best Interests Assessor, Approved Mental Health Professional and Practice Educator. Councils usually fund them, and they change both the work and the pay band.
Before you apply
- Social Work England registration
- A recognised social work degree or postgraduate qualification
- Enhanced DBS check, paid for by the employer
Social worker (adults) jobs: common questions
What qualifications do I need to work as a social worker?
Social Work England registration. A recognised social work degree or postgraduate qualification. Enhanced DBS check, paid for by the employer.
Where does AceLeads Jobs have published figures for adult social worker jobs?
In 151 English councils with adult social services responsibilities. Skills for Care collects the workforce data set for England only, so there is no equivalent local figure for Wales or Scotland. Adverts themselves are UK wide.
Do you decide who gets sent to an employer?
No. You read the adverts, you choose one, and you apply to that employer yourself. Nothing on this site forwards a person to a job they did not apply to, and no employer is given a list of people.
What does it cost to use?
Nothing, ever. It is always free for job seekers, and employers pay to advertise. There is no premium account, no paid profile and no fee of any kind on the job seeker side.