37.5% of EU Jobs Are in Sectors Where Many Workers Have a Degree

What the category actually contains

Knowledge-intensive activities are defined by sector rather than by occupation. Eurostat classifies industries in which the share of tertiary-educated workers exceeds a threshold, then counts everyone employed in them: education, health, finance, information and communication, professional services and most of public administration.

Across the EU, 37.5% of employment fell inside that boundary in 2025 — three jobs in eight.

Because the classification is sectoral, a receptionist in a law firm counts and a highly skilled machinist in a factory does not. The measure describes the composition of an economy rather than the skill content of individual jobs, and that distinction matters for reading the ranking.

The top

Luxembourg records 62.7%. Its financial sector alone accounts for a large share of national employment, and finance is inside the boundary.

Sweden follows at 50.1%, and those two are the only Member States where knowledge-intensive activities employ a majority of workers — Sweden by a tenth of a point. Belgium is at 47.2%, Ireland at 46.7% and the Netherlands at 44.4%. Cyprus at 41.7%, Denmark at 41.3% and Malta at 40.7% complete the group above 40%, with Austria sitting exactly on it.

The bottom, and the one that stands out

Romania records 24.0%, the lowest in the Union by a clear margin: Bulgaria, next, is at 31.9%.

Italy at 33.5% is the observation that does not fit the rest of the pattern. It is the Union's third-largest economy, and it sits below Slovakia, Poland and Latvia on this measure. Spain at 34.1% is the fifth-lowest and the only other large western economy in the group; the two below Italy are Romania and Bulgaria. Spain and Slovakia are a tenth of a point apart and Eurostat does not compute their employment on the same rule, so that part of the order should be left alone — the limitation below sets out why.

Italy's position is consistent with the picture its other indicators give: 3.8% ICT specialists against an EU figure of 5.0%, and 43.8% online purchasing against 62.4%. A single low reading would be noise; three from different surveys pointing the same way is a structural feature of the Italian economy rather than a measurement artefact.

Why the ranking is about industrial structure

A country's score on this indicator is largely a description of what its firms do. Economies concentrated in manufacturing, agriculture, construction and tourism will score low regardless of how well those sectors are run, because those sectors sit outside the classification.

That makes the measure useful for describing structure and misleading as a quality judgement. A high figure is not a statement that a country's workers are better; it is a statement about which industries employ them.