The EU region with the highest employment rate is the archipelago of Åland in Finland (86.4%).
This small Swedish-speaking community in the Baltic Sea leads the latest Eurostat release on jobs, closely followed by a string of central European capital cities: Warsaw (86.2%), Bratislava (85.4%), and Budapest (85.3%).
The new stats come as EU authorities herald a “historic” 75.8% record employment across the bloc for people aged 20 to 64, thanks to a 2.7% increase from 2021.
It also means that the EU may be on track to meet the 78% employment target set for 2030 by the European Pillar of Social Rights Action Plan.
The strategy lays out 20 key principles to secure “fair and well-functioning labour markets and social protection systems”.
That also includes having 60% of the EU workforce in training every year and reducing the number of people at risk of poverty and social exclusion by 15 million.
Which regions have already reached the employment target?
Out of 243 regions with available data, 113 (or 46.5%) have already reached or passed the 78% mark.
Aside from countries with fewer than two million people, most of these high-performing clusters are in northern Europe.
More precisely, in the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland, Denmark and the Czech Republic, all single regions have an employment rate of at least 78%.
Germany also ranks high. The country has only three of its 38 departments still below target — namely Berlin, Bremen and Düsseldorf.
At the opposite end, and excluding overseas territories, like non-metropolitan France, or Spain’s enclaves Ceuta and Melilla on the northern coast of Africa, Italy holds seven of the 10 EU regions with the worst reported rates: Calabria (48.5%), Campania (49.4%) and Sicily (50.7%).
Other clusters with low rates were found in south-west Spain, southern Romania and eastern Greece, while the Belgian departments of Brussels and Hainaut stand out as the only western European territories under 65%.
Tourism drives Greece’s growth: How long will it last?
Although southern Europe still largely lags behind, many of its regions are showing some of the fastest-growing rates across the EU.
A Euronews analysis of Eurostat data — covering regions of at least 300,000 — shows that employment in several Greek regions has skyrocketed since 2021.
The surge is largely driven by a significant rebound in the tourism and hospitality sectors following COVID-19, according to Theodore Koutroukis, labour market professor at Thrace University.
Can an end to the war in Ukraine extend Greece’s growth?
“Hospitality, food services, and retail sectors have generated more than 50% of all new salaried jobs over the past four years,” he said. “Tourism alone accounted for around 401,000 jobs in 2024.”
Greece also introduced several new labour market reforms, including a minimum wage boost, a reduction of labour taxes, and, more broadly, a new legal framework that “encouraged job creation”, Koutroukis added, “especially among women and people 45-64 year-olds”.
“A digitalisation boost, green transition projects and regional policy decentralisation further stimulated regional job growth”, he said.
Whether Greece’s growth can continue at the same pace remains uncertain.
“Tourism has probably hit its short-term maximum”, Koutroukis stated, “but if the war in Ukraine stops, maybe new Russian tourist flows will benefit the services sector”.
He also questioned whether the occupations that are driving growth in Greece can be considered “quality jobs” in terms of compensation, stability, autonomy, and working hours.
Similar, though less pronounced, job growth patterns have been observed in regions of Spain, Italy, Croatia and Portugal. At the other end of the spectrum — with negative employment trends — are almost exclusively northern European regions.
Between 2021 and 2024, EU regional employment rates fell the most in central Sweden (-2.1%) and in central and western Lithuania (-1.4%). Most regions showing a decline, however, are German.
“The fall in the employment rate largely reflects that many regions in Germany have experienced a long economic recession, particularly in the manufacturing sector”, said Claus Schnabel, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
“The export-led German model is no longer effective, as Germany has lost market share abroad and is less innovative than it was before,” he said.
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