The firm's 2012-2013 Salary Increase Survey found that more than 62% of employers considering redundancies were in the service industry.
The report did find that salary increase budgets for employers remain on target. Almost half of employers are setting their salary budgets in order to remain market-competitive.
The highest concentration of pay freezes will be in the construction and engineering industries, the report predicts. No pay freezes are being considered by employers within the commercial real estate, pharmaceutical, insurance and food and beverage industries.
Andrew Macleod, leader of Aon Hewitt's pay research practice in the UK, said: "This high potential figure for redundancies may stem in part from UK organisations feeling that they continually have to adapt and reorganise to remain competitive in what is still a volatile economic environment.
"By contrast, the same organisations are signalling that increases in salary budgets are holding strong at a rate of 3% – but with marked differences between industries.
"At a sectoral level, it's notable that while the first few weeks of 2013 have featured bad news for some traditional high street stores, more than two-thirds of retailers in our survey said they are actually planning to increase payroll spend and recruitment activity this year."
Macleod added: "It may be that rather than all organisations simply reflecting a uniform pattern of overall economic growth and decline, we are now beginning to see a more fundamental change in which there are big variations in both sectors and companies as they focus on the three 'R's – recruitment, restructuring and redundancy."
The Aon Hewitt 2012-2013 Salary Increase Survey was conducted in January 2013. It covers 44 countries and 395 organisations and includes more than 2,145 individual local country data submissions. The UK element of the survey included responses from 255 organisations across a variety of sectors.
