Temporary employment and its stated reasons
- Eurostat dataset
- lfsa_etgar
- Reference period
- 2025
- Unit of measure
- thousand persons
Key estimates
- EU aggregate (2025): 100.0 thousand persons.
- Highest value: Austria at 100.0 thousand persons; lowest: Türkiye at 100.0 thousand persons.
- Cross-country mean 100.0 thousand persons, standard deviation 0.00, coefficient of variation 0.0% across 34 reporting countries.
- Aggregate change 2014→2025: +0.0% on a constant panel of 33 countries.
How large is Europe's temporary workforce? Eurostat dataset lfsa_etgar reports temporary employment and its stated reasons for 34 reporting countries, with 2025 as the most recent period carrying broad coverage. The European aggregate stands at 100.0 thousand persons. Recording the reason for temporary contracts separates transitional arrangements from structural precarity.
The five highest values in 2025 are recorded by Austria (100.0), Bosnia and Herzegovina (100.0), Belgium (100.0), Bulgaria (100.0), Switzerland (100.0), all expressed in thousand persons. At the opposite end of the distribution sit Türkiye (100.0), Slovakia (100.0), Slovenia (100.0), Sweden (100.0), Serbia (100.0). The ratio between the highest and the lowest observation is 1.00, while the median country reports 100.0 thousand persons against a mean of 100.0 thousand persons.
Dispersion is wide: the standard deviation across countries is 0.00 thousand persons, giving a coefficient of variation of 0.0%. The mean sits below the median, which indicates that the distribution is pulled by the lower tail rather than being symmetric. Any European average quoted for this indicator therefore describes a synthetic country that few Member States resemble.
Between 2014 and 2025 the summed value across the 33 countries reporting in both periods moved by +0.0%. The largest relative increases are observed in Austria (+0.0%), Belgium (+0.0%), Bulgaria (+0.0%); the largest decreases, or the smallest increases, in Türkiye (+0.0%), Slovakia (+0.0%), Slovenia (+0.0%). Because the panel is held constant, this change is not an artefact of countries entering or leaving the sample.
Lower values are the policy-preferred direction, so the top of the distribution identifies where the burden concentrates: bringing the highest observation down to the median would remove 0.00 thousand persons from the European total for that country alone. The estimates above are reproducible: the dataset identifier, filter dimensions and reference period are stated in the methodological note, and the series can be re-downloaded from the Eurostat dissemination API at any time.
Methodological note
Source: Eurostat, dataset lfsa_etgar ('Temporary employees by main reason'), extracted from the Eurostat dissemination API (JSON-stat 2.0) on the dataset update of 2026-06-30. Filter dimensions: sex=T; age=Y20-64; reason=TOTAL. Unit of measure: thousand persons. Reference period: 2025. Geographic perimeter: national reporting units with two-character geo codes (34 countries with a non-missing observation); European and euro-area aggregates are excluded from the cross-country statistics and reported separately. Descriptive statistics (mean, median, population standard deviation, coefficient of variation) are computed unweighted over reporting countries. Change over time is computed on a constant panel: only countries with a non-missing observation in both the base and the reference period enter the calculation, which removes composition effects but may differ from the officially published aggregate. No imputation, seasonal adjustment or re-scaling has been applied beyond what Eurostat performs at source. Flagged provisional and estimated observations are retained as published.
Source data
The underlying series can be inspected and re-downloaded from the Eurostat data browser.