EU Employment rate up, labour market slack down in Q3 2024

In the third quarter of 2024, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 in the EU stood at 75.9%, an increase of 0.1 percentage points (pp) compared with the second quarter of 2024.

Labour market slack - encompassing those with unmet employment needs, a large part of which includes unemployed persons - amounted to 10.9% of the extended labour force aged 20-64 in the third quarter of 2024 (a decrease of 0.1 pp compared with the second quarter of 2024).

This information comes from data on the labour market in the third quarter of 2024 published today by Eurostat. This article presents only a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article.

Labour market slack and employment rate in the EU, Q1 2009 to Q3 2024. Line chart - click below to see full dataset

Source datasets: lfsi_emp_q and lfsi_sla_q

Between the second and the third quarter of 2024, Malta (+1.4 pp), Romania (+0.6 pp) and Ireland, Italy and Cyprus (each +0.5 pp) registered the highest increases in the employment rate among the 10 EU countries where employment rose. The employment rate remained stable in Latvia and the Netherlands and decreased in 15 EU countries, with the biggest decreases recorded in Luxembourg (-1.0 pp), Slovenia (-0.9 pp) and Estonia (-0.7 pp).

Change in the employment rate in the EU, Q3 2024 compared with Q2 2024. Bar chart - click below to see full dataset

Source dataset: lfsi_emp_q

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Methodological notes

The extended labour force is the total number of people employed, unemployed, and those seeking work but not immediately available, plus those available to work but not seeking. In this article, data cover population aged 20 to 64.
This article uses quarterly and seasonally adjusted data from the EU labour force survey (EU-LFS) data.

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