Regional Employment Rates in the EU

The EU is close to a target it has never met

The employment rate of people aged 20 to 64 reached 76.1% across the European Union in 2025. Behind that percentage are 197.8 million people in work, and the highest reading in a series that begins in 2009, when the same measure stood at 67.3%.

The figure matters because the Union has committed to a number. The European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan sets a headline target of 78% by 2030. The distance left is 1.9 percentage points, and the gain over the last twelve months was 0.4 points. On that pace the target arrives late rather than never, which is a more interesting position than either success or failure: it makes the composition of the remaining gap the thing worth reading.

Where the Union is wide

The distance between Member States is 16.0 percentage points. Malta records the highest rate at 83.6%, followed by the Netherlands at 83.4% and Czechia at 82.9%. At the other end sit Greece at 71.0%, Romania at 69.0% and Italy at 67.6%.

Three countries in the top group already sit more than five points above the 2030 target, while the bottom three would need gains no Member State has achieved in a decade to reach it. The EU average is not a description of a typical country; it is the midpoint of a distribution that stretches across sixteen points.

Italy's gap is a gender gap

Italy's last place is not a general weakness spread evenly across its population. Italian men record an employment rate of 77.1%, which is below the EU male average of 80.9% but unremarkable. Italian women record 58.0%, the lowest female employment rate in the Union — below Romania at 59.5% and Greece at 62.3%.

The resulting distance between Italian men and Italian women is 19.1 percentage points, the widest of any Member State, ahead of Romania at 18.7 and Greece at 17.4. Across the EU as a whole the same gap is 9.6 points, women at 71.3% against men at 80.9%.

This reframes the national ranking. Italy does not have a broad employment problem so much as a female participation problem large enough to move the national average to the bottom of the table. A country that closed its gender gap to the EU average would, arithmetically, no longer be last.

Regions diverge more than countries do

National averages compress the picture. Measured across the 244 EU regions with a published value for 2024, the spread is more than twice the national one.

The highest regional rate is Åland, the Finnish archipelago, at 86.4%, narrowly ahead of Warszawski stołeczny in Poland at 86.2% and Bratislavský kraj in Slovakia at 85.4%. Six regions in total exceeded 85% that year, against an EU aggregate of 75.7%.

The lowest are in southern Italy: Sicilia at 50.7%, Campania at 49.4% and Calabria at 48.5%. Setting aside Mayotte, which is discussed below, Calabria and Campania were the only regions in the comparable series where fewer than half of the working-age population held a job.

The pattern that survives inspection is not north against south in the abstract. It is capital and near-capital regions pulling away from peripheries within the same country: Warszawski stołeczny and Bratislavský kraj sit at the top of the European table while their national averages sit in the middle of it.