Significant local variations in long-term unemployment in 2024 are evident across the EU, according to Eurostat, with rates ranging from 0.4% to 16.3%. Long-term unemployment in Cyprus was 1.3% in 2024, below the EU average of 1.9%.
In 2024, 4.2 million people across the European Union had been unemployed for a year or more. The long-term unemployment rate, defined as the share of the labor force (aged 15 to 74) that has been unemployed for 12 months or longer, stood at 1.9%. This means that roughly one in three unemployed individuals in the EU had been jobless long-term.
Out of the 195 regions at level two of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS 2), for which data are available, 82 recorded rates above the EU average, 106 had rates below the average, and seven had the same rate. Cyprus recorded a long-term unemployment rate of 1.3% in 2024, which is below the EU average of 1.9%.
Highest Rates Observed
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%) and Ciudad de Ceuta (15.8%) had the highest rates. The French outermost region of Guadeloupe (11.4%) has also recorded a double-digit rate, while three regions in southern Italy had long-term unemployment rates of at least 8.0%: Campania (9.9%), Calabria (8.3%), and Sicilia (8.0%).
(Source: CNA)
