One in five young market traders in Britain has a master's degree or PhD, according to new figures shared with The Guardian. The National Market Traders Federation (NMTF) collected this data and found that the type of people setting up market stalls has changed quite a bit in recent years.

Joe Harrison runs the NMTF. He says that over the past two to three years — starting around 2023 — more highly educated young people have started working in markets. This timing matters. During that same period, it became harder for graduates to find jobs in their fields, and the cost of living went up. At the same time, entry-level professional jobs (like junior roles at law firms) did not pay much more, making it harder for young people to afford living in big UK cities.

The same pattern shows up in other parts of the market world. Kerb runs several popular food markets in London. Three-quarters of the people who started Kerb businesses have university degrees. One in four of them have a postgraduate degree (a step beyond a basic university degree). And importantly, 95% of these founders work on their businesses full-time — which means they are treating this as a real job, not just a side project.

Two real examples show how this works. Wiktoria Anna is 29 and studied law at university. She became a qualified solicitor in 2022. But in 2023, she left her law job to sell watercolour paintings, prints and workshops at markets full-time. Anastasia Maseychik is 28 and studied history at Durham University, getting top marks. Now she sells gaming cards at markets — and 95% of her sales happen in person at the market stall, not online. Both of them left careers that would have been seen as prestigious and secure to run their own market businesses.

Charlie Ball studies how graduates find jobs in the UK. He called these figures "very striking." That matters because when the UK tracks where graduates end up, it usually counts jobs at big companies, government agencies or professional offices. Market trading has never been something worth counting — let alone something attracting people with advanced degrees at this rate.

Running a market stall works very differently from having a salaried job. When you run a stall, you decide your prices, your profits and your hours. You do not pay rent for a shop, which saves a lot of money. But you have to accept that some days few people will come, bad weather might keep customers away, and business depends on what the market is that day. For someone trained as a solicitor or with a master's degree, choosing to leave a set career path and own their own small business says something about how they see traditional professional jobs — especially the pay, working conditions, and how much control or freedom they would have had.

But we should be careful not to jump to conclusions. The data does not tell us whether these traders left their jobs because they could not find professional work, or whether they chose market trading because it looked like a good opportunity. Market trading may have become more attractive because of things like Instagram and Facebook (cheap ways to advertise), more customers wanting to buy from small independent sellers rather than big chains, and people's appetite for special markets after the pandemic. Both reasons could be true at the same time. The figures available do not separate the two.

There is also something important about how the data was collected. The NMTF and Kerb are two different organizations tracking two different groups — one counts all market traders across the country, the other counts people in London street food markets. So we should not treat the numbers like they are all one picture of what is happening across Britain. The "one in five" figure and the "three-quarters" figure describe different (though overlapping) groups of people.

In the broader UK conversation about jobs, this adds something new. Usually people talk about university graduates who could not find good jobs and ended up working in shops, restaurants, or driving for delivery apps — jobs that do not need a degree. But running your own market business is different. It looks more like entrepreneurship (starting your own business) than like being stuck in the wrong type of job. Still, the money is uncertain and there are no benefits like sick pay or a pension, which feels more like the second type of work.

No one yet knows if this will continue. These figures show what was happening in 2023 and 2024, not whether this will keep going. The NMTF and Kerb are still working out whether highly educated young people will keep entering market trading or whether this was just something that happened because finding graduate jobs was especially difficult during those couple of years.