Some three million unemployed individuals across the European Union moved into employment in the first quarter of 2025, new data from Eurostat has revealed.
This means that 23.8% of all unemployed individuals in the fourth quarter of 2024 found a job the following quarter.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, some 6.6 million people, or 52%, remained unemployed, while 3.1 million, or 24.2%, left the labour force entirely, according to the data.
Of those that were outside the labour force at the end of 2024, some 4.7 million entered employment in the first quarter of 2025, while 4.1 million transitioned into unemployment.
Year-on-year comparison
On an annual basis – comparing 2024 with the previous year – of all individuals in the EU who were unemployed in 2023, 36.9% remained unemployed in 2024, while another 36.9% moved into employment and 26.2% left the labour force.
For those employed in 2023, 94.0% stayed employed the previous year, while 1.9% became unemployed and 4.1% left the labour force. Transitions out of unemployment into jobs were highest in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Czechia, and lowest in Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria, Eurostat‘s data showed.
All data is derived from the EU Labour Force Survey and is seasonally adjusted. Read more here.
Job vacancy rate
Previous Eurostat data showed that The Netherlands boasted the highest job vacancy rate of any country in the European Union in the first quarter of this year, well ahead of the EU average of 2.2%.
Other countries to report a high job vacancy rate for the period included Belgium (4.1%), Austria (3.6%), Malta (3.0%), Cyprus (2.9%) and Germany (2.7%), the data showed.
