Sweden's Youth Unemployment Is Higher Than Greece's

The most misread statistic in European labour data

Youth unemployment is quoted more often than almost any other European figure and understood less often than most. Across the EU it stood at 15.2% in 2025.

The number that follows is not what most readers assume it to be. It does not mean that 15.2% of young Europeans are unemployed. It means that 15.2% of young Europeans who are in the labour force are unemployed — and most young Europeans are not in the labour force, because they are studying.

The Swedish case

Sweden records 24.3%, the third-highest youth unemployment rate in the European Union, above Greece at 19.1% and Italy at 20.6%.

Sweden also records a NEET rate of 5.9%, the second lowest in the Union, on a measure that counts young people not working and not studying as a share of the whole population.

Both figures are correct, and what reconciles them is who is counted rather than how large the denominator is. Taking the labour force out of the denominator does not move Sweden down. Eurostat publishes the same count against the whole age group, as the youth unemployment ratio — unemployed 15 to 24 year olds as a percentage of the total population of that age — and on that measure Sweden is first in the Union at 13.9% against 6.2% for the EU, while Greece and Italy fall to 4.6% each. Nor is the Swedish youth labour force small: 57.2% of Swedes aged 15 to 24 are in it, the fourth highest share in the Union against an EU figure of 40.7%. What is distinctive is who those young people are. They are largely students, and a student looking for a Saturday job and not finding one is unemployed by the international definition while remaining in education — counted as unemployed, and not counted as NEET.

Romania at the top is a different situation: a high unemployment rate alongside the Union's highest NEET rate at 19.2%. There the two measures agree, and the problem they describe is real. On the population denominator Romania falls to 6.2%, the EU figure itself, which is the arithmetic of a youth labour force of 23.8%, the third smallest in the Union — the small-denominator case the Swedish figure is usually mistaken for.

Where the two measures agree and where they do not

Germany at 7.1% has a NEET rate of 9.5%. It is one of only two Member States whose NEET rate is the higher of the two figures; Bulgaria, at 13.1% against 13.8%, is the other.

Sweden is the clearest divergence in the Union on either way of putting it: 18.4 percentage points separate its two rates, and one is more than four times the other. Spain comes next on the difference, at 24.9% unemployment against 11.5% NEET, and Portugal next on the multiple, at 19.5% against 8.0% — a factor of 2.4.

Reading the two together is not optional for this indicator. A youth unemployment rate quoted alone, without the share of young people actually in the labour force, does not support the conclusions usually drawn from it.