Inclusion criterion: Prohuman presence + the region's labour supply markets

Central & South-East European labour market

Fourteen countries in one comparable frame. The primary age band is 15–64 throughout. Where a figure is not harmonised, the chart shows it — not just the footnote. The question this dashboard answers is not where unemployment is low, but where there is still labour left to recruit.

Extremes

Ranges, not rankings

An extreme-value card is generated only for harmonised indicators. Where the measurement basis differs by country, the card says so instead — because a “highest / lowest” claim is a ranking by definition.

Full dataset

Every indicator, with every marking

Markings: harm. harmonised · partly partly comparable · n/a not comparable. Filtering highlights rows rather than hiding them, so you can see what you narrowed down from.

Country	Empl. 15–64	Unempl.	Avg. pay	Min. wage	GDP/cap PPS	Population

Supply side

Employment and unemployment, 15–64

The dashed line is the EU27 average. It is not part of the ranking, it does not affect the axis and it does not judge — it only states. Hatched bars are partly comparable measurements from national statistical offices.

Employment rate

Ages 15–64, % of the age group · 2025 · the figure under each country is its distance from the EU27 average

harmonised (Eurostat EU-LFS) partly comparable (national office) EU27 average data gap

Why 15–64 rather than 20–64? Because for recruitment purposes 15–19 year-olds are part of the pool too. The cost: every rate is 4–8 percentage points lower than in the 20–64 version, because young people enter the denominator. The EU 2030 target of 78% refers to the 20–64 band only — that band appears as a secondary, labelled row in the country report.

Unemployment rate

Ages 15–74, % of the active population · 2025 · the figure under each country is its distance from the EU27 average

harmonised partly comparable EU27 average

The most misleading indicator on this dashboard. In several countries of the region the reason few people can be hired is not high unemployment — it is that the active pool is small. Poland at 3,1% and Kosovo at 13,9% do not describe the same market. The Labour pool tab shows why.

The commercial edge of this dashboard

Labour pool: from total population to the employed

Four steps with the ratios between them. Computed from the same level data as the rate panels, so there is no unexplained gap between the two views. The chips recalculate the funnel for the selected set of countries.

Recruitability funnel

Total population → 15–64 → economically active → employed

What a recruiter sees differently from a statistical office

A statistical office publishes the unemployment rate because it measures labour market tightness. A staffing company cares about something else: how many people can be brought in at all. In the southern half of this region those two things come apart sharply.

In Kosovo fewer than half of the 15–64 population are employed, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina the figure is 55%. The missing part is not unemployed — it is inactive: working informally, emigrated, working unregistered on a family farm, or permanently detached from the labour market. Far fewer people can be moved into a formal employment relationship from those groups than the raw population figure suggests.

The practical conclusion: where the LFPR is low and the unemployment rate is also “acceptable”, there is no reserve — there is a narrow pool. The campaign should not be built around the unemployed but around bringing inactive people back — or the market simply does not scale to the planned headcount.

The reserve outside the funnel

Young people neither working nor studying

NEET means “not in employment, education or training”. A 15–29 year-old counts as NEET if they were not in employment and took part in no formal or non-formal education or training in the four weeks before the survey; whether they were looking for a job does not enter the definition. That is what separates this rate from unemployment — someone unemployed but attending a training course is not NEET, while a young person who has left the labour market altogether is NEET and does not appear in the unemployment rate at all. The funnel above ends with the employed; this is the part that sits outside it and can still be brought in, and the second bar on the chart is a subset of the first, not a second indicator.

NEET rate

Ages 15–29, % of the age group · 2025 · sorted by the NEET rate, highest first

Coverage: 11 of 14 countries. The same eleven for which the employment rate is harmonised — the eight EU members plus Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia. Albania and Kosovo are not in this Eurostat series at all, and for Montenegro Eurostat has published nothing since 2020; all three are drawn as written-out data gaps. No national-source substitution is applied here, because national NEET definitions differ in the training component and that difference is not visible on the published figure.

NEET, ages 15–29 of whom would like to work · the second figure is that group’s share of the NEET population EU27 average data gap, with the reason written out

The two bars say different things, and the second one is the commercial one. Romania has the third-highest NEET rate in the region at 19,2%, but only 7,1 percentage points of it would like to work — 37% of the group. In North Macedonia the rate is higher still at 23,4%, and 14,8 points of it want to work — 63%. That single figure, 14,8% of everyone aged 15–29, is larger than Croatia’s entire NEET rate.
A high NEET rate is therefore not automatically a reserve. In Bulgaria (33% of the group) and Romania (37%) the population is largely detached from the labour market; in North Macedonia, Serbia and Bosnia (59–63%) it is reachable. A campaign built on the first pair and a campaign built on the second are not the same campaign.

Cost side

Pay in nominal terms and in purchasing power

The difference between the two orderings is itself a finding. In nominal terms pay varies by a factor of 2,9; in purchasing power the gap is much smaller and the order rearranges.

Average gross monthly pay

Connected dot plot · the length of the grey line is the purchasing-power adjustment

nominal, EUR same pay in purchasing power (PPS) the gap between the two

Read the line, not the dots. Where the grey line is long, the nominal figure badly misrepresents what the pay actually buys. Romania is sixth in euro terms and first in purchasing power; Slovakia is seventh in euro terms and second from bottom in purchasing power. Two countries with the same euro wage are not the same labour cost proposition.

Scope of the pay figures is not uniform, and it biases two countries upward. Croatia and Slovenia report on legal entities only — employees of sole traders are left out. Hungary covers firms with five or more employees plus the whole public sector, Czechia converts to full-time equivalents, and Poland and Bulgaria cover the whole economy with no size threshold. Bulgaria’s 2025 figure is provisional. Romania is the 12-month average of the monthly INS series, and will fall by roughly 6% when the annual earnings release appears.

Purchasing power uses a mixed reference year, deliberately. Pay is 2025; the AIC price level index is 2024, because Eurostat has published no 2025 index. There is no EU27 reference line on this panel: Eurostat publishes no comparable monthly gross pay series, so any EU average would be a different concept on a different scope.

This indicator is not harmonised for any of the 14 countries, which is why every bar is hatched. Eurostat publishes no comparable monthly gross pay series; the figures come from national statistical office releases with differing coverage (in some countries the formal sector only, in others the self-employed are included) and differing reference years. Do not rank from this panel.

Statutory minimum wage

Statutory gross monthly minimum, 1 January 2026 · all twelve countries on one comparable basis

statutory gross minimum, Eurostat earn_mw_cur no national minimum wage

The gross / net problem is solved, and not by our own arithmetic. Eurostat states in the metadata of earn_mw_cur that where the statutory minimum is not fixed in gross terms, the net value is grossed up to cover the applicable taxes — which is the case for Montenegro and Serbia. The published series is therefore already on one basis, so Albania, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia sit in the same ranking as the eight EU members. No tax assumption of ours enters this chart, and no second source is mixed in: every dot is the same Eurostat series.

Two countries have no national minimum wage at all. Bosnia and Herzegovina sets it by entity, and Kosovo has none nationally. That is a legal fact rather than a missing figure, which is why those rows say so instead of showing a dash.

Slovenia rose by 15,99% for 2026, to €1 482. Serbia is €744; earlier versions of this dashboard carried €654, which matched neither half-year (2025-S1 €619, 2025-S2 €618).

Structure

Where people work

Agriculture – industry – services, share of the employed. Sorted by the agricultural share: the top of the list is where structural reallocation headroom remains.

Sectoral composition of employment

NACE Rev.2, three main branches · 2024

Coverage: all 14 countries. Bosnia and Herzegovina joined the panel from the BHAS labour force survey (7,1% agriculture, 33,4% industry, 59,5% services). Albania, Montenegro and North Macedonia come from INSTAT, MONSTAT and the State Statistical Office respectively.
Kosovo comes from the census, not a survey. Its shares are the 2024 census labour module (employment by economic activity, 15–64) — the same source as the three Kosovo rates elsewhere in this dashboard. Employed persons whose activity was not stated (7 811 of 443 364, or 1,8%) are excluded before the shares are taken, as they are for every other country.
Romania is the correction to look at. Its agricultural share reads 10,9% here. Earlier versions showed 20%, which was a pre-2021 EU-LFS figure: the 2021 reform removed subsistence farmers from the count and roughly halved the Romanian agricultural share. The ILO modelled estimate gives 11,3%, which corroborates the corrected figure.

agriculture industry and construction services hatched: partly comparable

Skills

What the workforce was trained for

The panel above says what the country produces. This one says with what kind of workforce. Sorted by the vocational share, because that is the group most staffing demand in this region actually draws on.

Educational attainment

Ages 25–64, ISCED 2011, four groups, % of the age group · 2025 · sorted by the vocational share

Coverage: 11 of 14 countries — the same eleven as the NEET panel, for the same reason. The shares are of the whole 25–64 population, not of the employed, and they sum to 100%.

lower secondary or less (ISCED 0–2) upper secondary, general upper secondary, vocational tertiary (ISCED 5–8)

Read this against the pay panel. Czechia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovakia and Romania all sit at 58–61,4% vocational — that is the depth of the blue-collar skill base, and it is the mirror image of the two lowest tertiary shares in the set: Bosnia and Herzegovina at 18,4% and Romania at 19,5%. Poland is the other end: 40% tertiary, the highest here, against an EU27 average of 36,9%. North Macedonia carries the largest low-attainment group at 25,5%.

Retraining

Who is still learning

The attainment mix above is a stock, built over decades and slow to move. This is the flow: how much of the adult population is in education or training right now.

Adult learning

Ages 25–64, participation in formal or non-formal education or training in the four weeks before the survey · 2025 · the figure under each country is its distance from the EU27 average

participation, last four weeks EU27 average data gap, with the reason written out

Levels only — this series cannot be read as a trend. The 2021 EU-LFS reform broke it in most countries: Romania reads 0,9% for 2018 and 10,2% for 2025, and most of that distance is methodology, not policy. It is the same reform that halved the Romanian agricultural share on the sectoral panel.
What the levels do say. The spread is twelvefold, from Slovenia’s 22,8% to Bosnia’s 1,8%. Where the figure is under 3%, the employer is effectively the only training system in the country: induction and upskilling are not a cost line to be optimised but the condition of hiring at all. Where it is 11–23%, there is a public system to build on.

Qualitative

Shortage occupations

Not a measurement but a summary based on national employment service and EURES releases. No ranking can be formed from it: the length and granularity of the lists differ by country. That is precisely why no KPI is attached. shown.

The six Western Balkan candidates only

Emigration and remittances

These two indicators do not cover the 14 countries and will not, so the eight EU members are not drawn here at all — an empty row communicates nothing. The “WB6” label is correctly narrow; it is not a stale caption in need of updating. The dashed line is the group average for each chart, and each stem shows the distance from it, so the spread is visible rather than compressed against a zero baseline.

Emigration rate

Emigrants as a share of the resident population, UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024 (worldwide, by country of birth) · each stem measures the distance from the five-country average — Kosovo is not covered

above the five-country average below it five-country average

Roughly every second person born in Albania or in Bosnia and Herzegovina now lives abroad. That is not a turn of phrase — it is what the stock figures say, and it is the single most consequential fact here for anyone planning headcount. It is also why the raw 15–64 population figure overstates the recruitable pool.

Definition, because it changed. Emigration rate here is UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024: the worldwide stock of emigrants by country of birth, as a percentage of the resident population. It is not the OECD DIOC measure of migration to OECD countries only, which runs systematically lower — earlier versions of this dashboard used figures that matched no published series at all. UN DESA does not treat Kosovo as a separate country of origin, so Kosovo is a written data gap here; the two alternatives we found differ from each other by a factor of 2,2 and use different definitions, so neither belongs in this panel.

Remittances

As a share of GDP, World Bank · each stem measures the distance from the six-country average

above the WB6 average below it WB6 average

Read this next to the emigration chart, not on its own. Kosovo is high on both: heavy outflow and heavy dependence on money sent home. Montenegro shows the opposite pattern — moderate emigration but high remittances against a very small GDP. Where remittance income is large, a formal job competes with a transfer that arrives without work, which lifts the wage floor a recruiter actually faces.

North Macedonia at 2,7% needs a caveat. This is the balance-of-payments figure, so it counts money moving through formal channels only. Informal remittances to North Macedonia are estimated to be far higher, but those estimates are not balance-of-payments data and are therefore not comparable with the other five countries. The 5,5% that earlier versions carried was the largest relative error in the whole dataset.

One country in detail

Country report

Country

Measurement basis on every card. The ranking counts only those countries for which the indicator is defined, so the denominator differs from card to card. Each card names its source, reference year and age band, and carries the harmonisation status of the underlying series.

Head to head

Direct comparison

Where the two countries have a different measurement basis, the row declares no winner. That is not a shortcoming but the correct answer: of two figures that are not comparable, neither is larger.

Country A vs Country B

Method

What is measured, from what, and what is not comparable

Inclusion criterion

Prohuman presence + the region's labour supply markets. The 14 countries: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia.

Primary age band: 15–64

For all 14 countries, on every panel. The 20–64 band remains in the country report as a secondary, labelled row. The reason for the switch is a recruitment one: 15–19 year-olds are part of the labour pool. The cost is that every rate is 4–8 percentage points lower than it would be on a 20–64 dashboard. The EU 2030 employment target of 78% refers to the 20–64 band only — do not benchmark the 15–64 figures against it.

The three harmonisation statuses

Harmonised: Eurostat EU-LFS or earn_mw_cur: same definition, same reference period, comparable across countries. Only these generate extreme-value cards. The employment rate, the unemployment rate and the participation rate are harmonised for eleven of the fourteen countries — the eight EU members plus Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Serbia, for which Eurostat now publishes the 15–64 and 20–64 series. They are not harmonised for Albania (not in the Eurostat series), Kosovo (not in the series) or Montenegro (Eurostat has published nothing since 2020; the last figure was 17,9%). The minimum wage is harmonised for twelve. The NEET rate, educational attainment and adult learning come from the same EU-LFS and share exactly this coverage — the same eleven countries, and the same three exceptions, so the education block adds no new kind of gap to this dashboard.
Partly comparable: National statistical office, ILO-compatible definition, but its own survey frame, sample and sometimes a different reference year. Hatched on the charts. Can be ordered, but differences of half a percentage point carry no meaning.
Not comparable: No data, or a different measurement basis (for example net versus gross minimum wage). Shown with a dashed outline and a written reason. Receives no value in the ranking.

What is calculated, and what is not

The participation rate is a published figure, not a calculation. Eurostat’s lfsi_emp_a reports the activity rate directly, so it is read from the source for eleven countries and taken from INSTAT’s published participation rate for Albania. An earlier version derived it from employment and unemployment; that formula produced results within 0,16 percentage points of the published series, but a sourced figure beats a good formula, and the formula has been removed.

Two things remain calculated. Pay in purchasing power is nominal pay divided by the AIC price level index ÷ 100. The funnel levels are the published rate multiplied by the published 15–64 population — all three inputs sourced, so the funnel carries no independent estimate of its own. Inactivity is 100 minus the participation rate.

Sources by country

Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia: Eurostat EU-LFS (employment, unemployment), earn_mw_cur (minimum wage), prc_ppp_ind (GDP per capita in PPS), lfsa_egan2 (NACE).
Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Serbia: Eurostat now publishes the harmonised 15–64 and 20–64 employment rates and the harmonised unemployment rate for all three, so their rates sit in the same series as the EU members. Sector breakdowns come from the national offices (BHAS, the State Statistical Office, RZS). The North Macedonian database is called MAKSTAT while the institution is the State Statistical Office — this dashboard names the institution.
Albania (INSTAT): INSTAT moved its headline rate to 15+ from the Q4 2025 release, so the 15–64 employment and participation rates here are the average of the published quarters — our calculation, stated on the card. The annual unemployment rate is INSTAT’s published 15+ figure, and the chart writes the age band next to it.
Kosovo (KAS): no Labour Force Survey was released for 2025, so the three rates come from the labour module of the 2024 census, not from an LFS. The 15–64 population is from the same source (514 791 active plus 548 896 inactive).
Montenegro (MONSTAT): reports on a 15–89 basis. The figures are printed with the age band, and excluded from every ranking and from the funnel.
Emigration: UN DESA International Migrant Stock 2024 — worldwide stock by country of birth, for the five Western Balkan candidates it covers.
Remittances: World Bank WDI, as a share of GDP, for all six.
Bosnia and Herzegovina, two caveats. Eurostat publishes no population figure for Bosnia, so its 15–64 population is derived from the Eurostat employment level and rate, and the denominator of every per-capita measure is less certain than elsewhere. Its 2025 pay growth of +14% (2 138 to 2 436 BAM) may contain a definitional effect from the Federation’s income tax reform of 1 January 2025, so it should not be read as real wage growth. On the sector split, BHAS gives an agricultural share of 7,1% while the ILO modelled estimate gives 17,1%; the dashboard uses the national survey.

Education and skills

NEET stands for “not in employment, education or training”: not in employment, and no formal or non-formal education or training in the four weeks before the survey. Job search does not enter the definition, so the rate is not a variant of the unemployment rate.

NEET is measured on 15–29, not 15–24. The younger band is dominated by students, so it describes the education system rather than the labour market. 15–29 is also the EU headline band. The second bar on that panel is a subset of the first, not a second indicator: NEET who would like to work, seeking or not. Eurostat publishes the NEET rate as a percentage only — there is no headcount in the series — which is why it sits beside the funnel rather than inside it.

Adult learning is the four-week measure, the only one published annually and comparable across countries. The twelve-month measure behind the EU 2030 target of 60% exists for 2022 and 2016 only, and is deliberately not used here. Neither series may be read as a trend across 2021, when the EU-LFS reform broke both: the Romanian adult-learning rate reads 0,9% for 2018 and 10,2% for 2025, and most of that distance is methodology. It is the same reform that halved the Romanian agricultural share.

Educational attainment is measured on the whole 25–64 population, not on the employed, and the four ISCED groups sum to 100%. “Vocational” is ISCED 35 and 45 — upper secondary and post-secondary non-tertiary with a vocational orientation.

What is deliberately absent: company and national training spend. The only comparable sources are the Continuing Vocational Training Survey and the Labour Cost Survey, both with a 2020 reference year, and the labour cost survey covers only the EU members plus Serbia among these fourteen. A 2020 figure standing next to 2025 rates would break the single-vintage rule this dashboard is built on, so the indicator is not shown. Cedefop’s Skills Forecast is not used either: of the six Western Balkan candidates it covers North Macedonia only.

Preview note. The three indicators in this block were pulled for this preview build and pass every arithmetic check the series allow: the NEET subsets sum to the NEET total in all eleven countries, and the four attainment shares sum to 100% in all eleven. They still need a script-based re-pull, one country and one period per request, before publication. Delete this paragraph once that is done.

Data vintage

Rates and pay: 2025. Employment, unemployment, participation and average gross pay are 2025 for all fourteen countries — a single vintage, because a mixed set is not comparable. Kosovo’s pay is now 2025 as well: the Kosovo Agency of Statistics released it on 29 May 2026, which removed the last non-2025 figure in the set. The NEET rate, educational attainment and adult learning are 2025 as well, so the whole EU-LFS block on this dashboard now sits on one vintage.

Reference dates that differ, and say so on the card. The minimum wage is a legal fact rather than a survey: 1 January 2026. GDP per capita in purchasing power, the AIC price level index, the sector breakdown, emigration and remittances are 2024 finals. Population is 1 January 2025. Purchasing-power pay necessarily mixes years: 2025 pay against the 2024 price level index, because Eurostat has published no 2025 index.

Total population has its own source. It comes from Eurostat demo_pjan and, for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, from the national offices. It is used only for the first step of the labour pool funnel; every rate on this dashboard is measured against the 15–64 population, not against this figure.

Get in touch

Questions about this dashboard?

If you have an observation, a question, or a figure that does not match your own source, we want to hear it. This dashboard states where it is uncertain on purpose — a message that contradicts a number is worth more to us than one that agrees with it.

The same applies to anything else: coverage of a country we have not included, an indicator you would need for a hiring decision, or a request for the underlying dataset.

If your message is about a specific chart, please name the panel — it makes the figure much faster to find.