Long-term unemployment ranged dramatically from 0.4 per cent to 16.3 per cent across EU regions in 2024, highlighting significant disparities in labour market resilience, according to Eurostat.

Eurostat’s latest report showed that 4.2 million people across the EU had been unemployed for a year or more in 2024.

The long-term unemployment rate, which is defined as the share of the labour force aged 15 to 74 years that has been unemployed for 12 months or more, stood at 1.9 per cent for the whole bloc.

Eurostat said that as such, “around 1 in 3 unemployed people in the EU had been jobless long-term.”

Examining the 195 regions at level 2 of the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS 2) for which data are available, 82 regions recorded long-term unemployment rates above the EU average of 1.9 per cent.

Conversely, 106 regions had rates below the average, and seven regions matched the EU-wide figure.

Consistent with the overall unemployment rate, some of the highest long-term unemployment rates were observed in southern EU countries and several of France’s outermost regions.

The autonomous Spanish regions of Ciudad de Melilla (16.3 per cent) and Ciudad de Ceuta (15.8 per cent) recorded, by far, the highest rates across the continent.

The French outermost region of Guadeloupe (11.4 per cent) was the only other region in the EU to report a double-digit rate.

Another French outermost region, La Réunion (8.2 per cent), also registered a relatively high rate.

Three regions in southern Italy also recorded long-term unemployment rates of at least 8.0 per cent: Campania (9.9 per cent), Calabria (8.3 per cent), and Sicilia (8.0 per cent).

In sharp contrast, the long-term unemployment rate was below 1.0 per cent in 52 regions across the EU.

These regions were primarily concentrated in northern Belgium, Czechia, Denmark (where all five regions fell below 1.0 per cent), north-western Hungary, the Netherlands (all 10 regions for which data are available), Austria, and Poland; Malta also recorded a rate below 1.0 per cent.

The lowest rate in the EU, 0.4 per cent, was observed in four distinct regions.

These include the neighbouring Czech regions of Praha and Střední Čechy, and Utrecht and Noord-Brabant in the Netherlands.