{"id":634890,"date":"2026-06-12T13:23:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:23:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/634890\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T13:23:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T13:23:16","slug":"employment-rate-up-labour-market-slack-down-in-q1-2026-news-articles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/634890\/","title":{"rendered":"Employment rate up, labour market slack down in Q1 2026 – News articles"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the first quarter of 2026, the employment rate<\/a> of people aged 20-64 in the EU<\/a> stood at 76.3%, up from 76.2% in the fourth quarter of 2025.<\/p>\n

Labour market slack<\/a> \u2013 all persons who have an unmet need for employment, including unemployed people \u2013 stood at 10.9% of the extended labour force aged 20-64 in the first quarter of 2026, down from 11.0% in the fourth quarter of 2025.<\/p>\n

This information comes from data on the labour market<\/a> in the first quarter of 2026, published today by Eurostat. This article presents only a handful of findings from the more detailed Statistics Explained article<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Labour<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Source datasets: lfsi_emp_q<\/a> and lfsi_sla_q<\/a><\/p>\n

Between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, Italy (+0.5 percentage points<\/a> (pp)), as well as Belgium, Cyprus, Lithuania, Slovakia and Sweden (+0.4 pp each), registered the highest increases in the employment rate among the 11 EU countries where employment rose. The employment rate remained stable in 6 EU countries and decreased in another 10 EU countries, with the biggest decreases recorded in Latvia (-0.8 pp), Ireland (-0.7 pp), as well as in Slovenia and Finland (-0.3 pp each).<\/p>\n

\"Change<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0Source dataset: lfsi_emp_q<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the first quarter of 2026, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 in the EU stood at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":132634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,4535,1294,4536,4537,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-634890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-data-driven-news","tag-economy","tag-lfs","tag-population-and-social-conditions","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634890","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=634890"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/634890\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/132634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=634890"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=634890"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=634890"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}