Approximately 8,380 jobs were vacant in the third quarter of 2021 according to the results of Statistics Iceland’s Job Vacancy Survey. At the same time the number of occupied jobs on the Icelandic labour market was estimated to be 222,797 resulting in a 3.6% job vacancy rate, see confidence interval in the table below.
Compared with the second quarter of 2021, the number of vacant jobs decreased by 160 and the job vacancy rate increased by 0.4 percentage points between quarters.
Comparison with the same quarter of 2020 shows that vacant jobs increased by 5,400 and the job vacancy rate increased by 2.2 percentage points.
| Job Vacancy Survey results from 3rd quarter 2021 | ||||
| Measure | Value1 | Standard error2 | Lower interval3 | Upper interval3 |
| Number of vacant jobs | 8,380 | 890 | 6,630 | 10,130 |
| Job vacancy rate | 3.6 | 0.3 | 2.4 | 3.9 |
| Number of occupied jobs4 | 222,797 | |||
1 Numbers are rounded to the nearest ten.
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.
4 The number of employed according to register data for the 2nd quarter of 2021.
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 more than one employee. The sample is constructed once every year, in the beginning of the year, from a sampling frame listing all legal entities in the year before. The reference date for the third quarter of 2021 was August 15th and the response rate 94%.
In the third quarter of 2021, changes were made to the methodology of the Job Vacancy Survey analysis. In order to increase the reliability of information on the number of occupied jobs data is now obtained from register data on the number of employees instead of using point estimates from the study, as has been done so far. The number of employees in August are used as provisional data on the number of occupied jobs in the third quarter. Therefore, the results are provisional and could change when more comprehensive data are available for the quarter.
Time series on Statistics Iceland's website have been updated in accordance with revised methods, i.e. using the number of occupied jobs from the labour force register to calculate the Job Vacancy Rate.
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.