In total, 5,590 jobs were vacant in the Icelandic labour market in the first quarter of 2024 according to Statistics Iceland’s job Vacancy Survey. At the same time, the number of occupied jobs was 227,250 and the job vacancy rate therefore 2.4% (see confidence intervals in table).
The number of vacant jobs increased by 840 between quarters and the job vacancy increased by 0.4 percentage points. Comparison with the first quarter of 2023 shows that the number of vacant jobs is 3,030 fewer now than last year and the job vacancy rate decreased by 1.3 percentage points between years.
The relative demand for employment continues to be highest in the construction industry. The vacancy rate in the industry has ranged from 5.6 to 13.3% since the first quarter of 2021. The number of vacancies has ranged from 870 to 2,180 in the construction industry each quarter during the same period, and the number of occupied jobs has increased by just over 4,400 jobs over the last three years.
About the data
The Icelandic Job vacancy survey is a sample survey, performed quarterly amongst legal entities in Iceland. The population consists of all legal entities in Iceland with one or more employees at the reference date of the survey. The sample is selected once every year, at the beginning of the year, from a sampling frame listing all legal entities in the year before based on Statistics Icelands‘enterprise registry. The reference date for the first quarter of 2024 was 15 February, 617 responded and the response rate was 88.8%.
Information about the number of occupied jobs comes from register data which is constantly revised and updated. To minimise changes to the time series, figures about occupied jobs are fixed when twelve months have passed from the reference period of the results. Statistics Iceland intends to revise the figures every three years if significant changes are visible in older figures.
Note that when updating statistics for the first quarter of 2024, the population figures for the weights for 2021 and 2022 were fixed and the whole time series from 2021 updated. This resulted in slight changes in the vacancy rate in some cases (between –0.2 and +0.1 percentage points).
When interpreting the results of vacant jobs and the job vacancy rate, it is important to keep in mind that they are built on a sample survey at a given reference period. Therefore, the results should be interpreted by taking the 95% confidence intervals into consideration.