Employment Rates Vary Far More Between EU Regions Than Between Countries

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%.

Malta and the Netherlands already sit more than five points above the 2030 target, and Czechia 4.9 points above it. At the other end, Italy would have to gain 10.4 points to reach the target, Romania 9.0 and Greece 7.0. Gains of that size have happened: nine Member States added at least 10.4 points between 2015 and 2025, Greece itself 16.2, though a span that long crosses the break noted below. The EU aggregate is not a description of a typical country: sixteen of the twenty-seven Member States already meet the 78% target, and the Member State in the middle of the ranking is at 78.3%, above both the aggregate and the target.

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 low — three Member States are lower and Spain is level with it — but not extreme: it is 3.8 points under the EU male average of 80.9% and 0.7 above the lowest. Italian women record 58.0%, the lowest female employment rate in the Union, 1.5 points below Romania at 59.5% and further still below 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's male rate is low and its female rate is the Union's lowest, and it is the female rate that puts the national average at the bottom of the table: a country that closed its gender gap to the EU average, with its male rate unchanged, would arithmetically no longer be last.

Regions diverge more than countries do

National averages compress the picture. The 244 EU regions with a published value for 2025 spread over 50.0 points, or 36.9 once Mayotte is set aside — either way more than twice the national one.

The highest regional rate is Warszawski stołeczny, the region around Warsaw, at 86.9%, ahead of Praha, the region of Prague, at 86.0% and Åland, the Finnish archipelago, at 85.5%. Five regions in total exceeded 85%, with a sixth exactly on it, against an EU aggregate of 76.1%.

Setting aside Mayotte, which is discussed below, the lowest are Guyane, the French department on the northern coast of South America, at 50.0%, then Calabria at 50.3% and Campania at 50.8%. A year earlier Calabria and Campania were both under half; in 2025 none is, and Guyane sits exactly on the line.

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 is the highest region in the Union while Poland sits thirteenth of the twenty-seven Member States, and the distance between it and Podkarpackie, Poland's lowest region, is 13.7 points — most of the way to the 16.0 points that separate the highest Member State from the lowest.