In 2024, 4.2 million people across the EU had been unemployed for a year or more. The long-term unemployment rate, defined as the share of the labour force (aged 15 to 74 years) that has been unemployed for 12 months or more, stood at 1.9%. As such, around 1 in 3 unemployed people in the EU had been jobless long-term. 

Of the 195 regions at level 2 of the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS 2) for which data are available, 82 recorded rates above the EU average, 106 had rates below the average, and 7 had the same rate.

As with the overall unemployment rate, some of the highest long-term unemployment rates were observed in southern EU countries and several of France’s outermost regions: 

The autonomous Spanish regions of Ciudad de Melilla (16.3%) and Ciudad de Ceuta (15.8%) had, by far, the highest rates. 
The French outermost region of Guadeloupe (11.4%) was the only other region in the EU with a double-digit rate. Another French outermost region, La Réunion (8.2%), also had a relatively high rate.
3 regions in southern Italy had long-term unemployment rates of at least 8.0%: Campania (9.9%), Calabria (8.3%) and Sicilia (8.0%). 

Source: lfst_r_lfu2ltu

In 52 regions across the EU the long-term unemployment rate was below 1.0% (2 lightest shades on the map). These regions were mainly concentrated in northern Belgium, Czechia, Denmark (all 5 regions), north-western Hungary, the Netherlands (all 10 regions for which data are available), Austria and Poland; Malta also recorded a rate below 1.0%. 

The lowest rate in the EU – 0.4% – was observed in 4 regions: the neighbouring Czech regions of Praha and Střední Čechy, and Utrecht and Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands. 

Would you like to know more about labour market statistics at the regional level? 

You can read more about labour market statistics in the Eurostat regional yearbook – 2025 edition, also available as a set of Statistics Explained articles, as well as in the labour market section of the interactive publication Regions in Europe and the Statistical Atlas.