In total, 7,570 jobs were vacant in the Icelandic labour market in the second quarter of 2024 according to Statistics Iceland’s Job vacancy survey. At the same time, 245,257 jobs were occupied and the job vacancy rate 3.0% (see confidence interval in table). The number of vacant jobs increased by 1,360 between quarters and the job vacancy rate increased by 0.4 percentage points.
Comparison with the second quarter of 2023 shows that the job vacancies increased by just over 1,000 jobs between years and the job vacancy rate increased by 0.3 percentage points.
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 business registry. The reference date for the second quarter of 2024 was 15 may, 628 responded and the response rate was 90%.
Information about the number of occupied jobs comes from register data which is constantly revised and updated. To minimize 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.
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.