There were around 2,900 jobs vacant in the Icelandic labour market in the first quarter of 2020 according to the results of Statistics Iceland’s job registration while 215,100 jobs were filled at the same time. The job vacancy rate was therefore about 1.3%, which is similar to the first quarter of 2019 when the vacancy rate was 1.5% . The reference date for the fourth quarter was February 15th and the response rate was 92%.
It is proper to note that because the reference date for the quarter was mid-February, the effect of COVID-19 is likely to be seen in the numbers for job vacancies in the next quarter.
In order to enable users to keep track of the progress of activities that may be affected by the COVID-19 epidemic, job vacancy numbers have now been updated with activity breakdowns. Moreover, the travel industry and related activities and fishing and aquaculture activities have been specially summarized. Based on this breakdown, it may be seen that the job vacancy rates in the travel industry and related activities was 3.9% and 0.1% in fishing and aquaculture in the first quarter of 2020.
| Measure | Value1 | Standard error2 | Lower interval3 | Upper interval3 |
| Number of vacant job position | 2,900 | 500 | 1,900 | 4,000 |
| Number of job positions | 215,100 | 7,800 | 199,700 | 230,500 |
| Job vacancy rate | 1.3 | 0.2 | 0.9 | 1.8 |
1 Numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred.
2 Standard error of a measure refers to the variance in measures between samples.
3 The upper and lower interval of a measure refers to the range of the confidence interval around the measure. In repeated samples, the population value will fall within the confidence interval in 95% of cases.