The EU's Highest Unemployment Is in Its Territories Outside Europe

A national rate is an average of very different places

Unemployment is usually reported by country. Counted region by region on the EU's statistical map — the NUTS 2 level — there are 241 regions with published rates for 2025, and the spread between them is roughly eighteen to one.

The EU average was 5.8%. The regional figures run from 25.0% to 1.4%.

The extremes are not on the mainland

The three highest rates belong to Ciudad de Melilla at 25.0%, Mayotte at 24.8% and Ciudad de Ceuta at 23.9%.

Melilla and Ceuta are Spanish cities on the North African coast; Mayotte is a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean. All three are small, geographically separated from the economies they belong to, and each is an administrative region in its own right.

The pattern holds below them. Guyane at 16.7%, Guadeloupe at 16.4% and La Réunion at 15.6% are fourth, fifth and sixth, and all three are French overseas departments as well. The first region on the European mainland is Dytiki Makedonia in northern Greece, seventh at 15.3%: of the seven regions above 15%, six lie outside continental Europe.

That matters for how the ranking is read. The worst unemployment in the European Union is not a feature of southern Spain or southern Italy in the way headline comparisons usually suggest; it is concentrated in a handful of small territories whose economies are structurally detached from the mainland.

Mayotte also carries the caveat this site applies to it consistently: it is covered by a separate annual survey and its figures are not fully comparable with the rest.

Where work is easiest to find

Střední Čechy in Czechia records 1.4%, Zeeland in the Netherlands 1.7% and the autonomous province of Bolzano in Italy 1.7%.

Thirty-five of the 241 regions are below 3% — a level normally treated as full employment. They are concentrated in Czechia, Poland, the Netherlands, Germany and northern Italy.

Bolzano at 1.7% inside Italy is the observation worth pausing on. Italy contains regions at both ends of the European distribution, and a national Italian unemployment rate averages them into a figure that describes neither.

The Romanian split

Bucureşti-Ilfov records 1.8%, among the lowest in the Union.

Romania also has the Union's highest NEET rate and the largest share of its workforce in low-productivity agriculture, both covered separately here. A capital region at near-full employment coexists with a countryside where a great many working-age people are outside the labour force entirely.

That is the limitation of an unemployment rate stated plainly: it counts people looking for work, and a region where people have stopped looking records a low rate for the wrong reason. Regional unemployment should be read next to regional employment rates, never instead of them.

What the distribution implies

Seven regions above 15% and thirty-five below 3% is not a distribution around a common European average. It is two populations of regions with very little between them at either tail.

Labour market policy set at national level acts on averages that, in several Member States, correspond to no actual region.