Approximately 3,000 jobs were vacant on the Icelandic labour market in the third quarter of 2020 according to the results of Statistics Iceland’s Job Vacancy Survey. At the same time the number of jobs was estimated to be 204,400 resulting in a 1.5% job vacancy rate.
Comparison with the third quarter of 2019 shows a decrease in the number of vacant jobs by 1,500 between years and in the job vacancy rate by 0.4 percentage points. The number of jobs was estimated to be 32,700 fewer than in the third quarter of 2019.
Compared with the second quarter of 2020, the number of vacant jobs has increased by 400 jobs. The number of jobs increased by 5,700 jobs between quarters while the job vacancy rate increased by 0.2 percentage points.
| Job Vacancy Survey results from third quarter 2020 | ||||
| Measure | Value1 | Standard error2 | Lower interval3 | Upper interval3 |
| Number of vacant job position | 3,000 | 500 | 2,100 | 4,000 |
| Number of job positions | 204,400 | 6,800 | 191,000 | 217,700 |
| Job vacancy rate | 1.5 | 0.2 | 1 | 1.9 |
1 Numbers are rounded to the nearest hundred.
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.
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 the Icelandic labour market that on average employ at least one individual on an annual basis. The sample is constructed once every year, in the beginning of the year, from a sampling frame of all legal entities from the year before. The reference date for the third quarter of 2020 was August 15th and the response rate 97%.