In total, 8,790 jobs were vacant in the Icelandic labour market in the third quarter of 2022 according to Statistics Iceland’s Job Vacancy Survey. At the same time, the number of occupied jobs was 233,777 and the job vacancy rate therefore 3.6% (see confidence intervals in table). Comparison with the third quarter of 2021 shows that the number of vacant jobs was very similar between years. During the same period, the number of occupied jobs increased by 12,560 and the job vacancy rate decreased by 0.2 percentage points.
The demand for employees was highest in the economic activity Construction (F) where 1,660 jobs were vacant and the job vacancy rate 9.3%. The job vacancy rate in Arts, entertainment and recreation (R-S) was 6.6% and in Accommodation and food service activities (G-I) the vacancy rate was 5.4%.
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 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‘ enterprise registry. The reference date for the third quarter of 2022 was 15 August, the sample size was 603 and the response rate was 99.1%.
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.