Modernisation of Labour Market statistics on Businesses

The project consists of a complete overhaul of the EU legislation in the domain of labour market statistics on businesses (LMB), as specified in Regulation (EU) 2025/941 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 7 May 2025.

It concerns the following topics:

• structure of earnings

• gender pay gap

• structure of labour costs

• labour cost index

• job vacancies. 

The main improvements are described in the next paragraphs.

As regards the four-yearly collection of microdata on the structure of earnings, the new legal framework will extend the coverage of the economy to micro-enterprises with less than 10 employees, for a subset of core variables, and to NACE Rev. 2.1 section P: ‘Public administration and defence; compulsory social security’. Timeliness will be also improved: data shall be transmitted 16 months after the reference year instead of 18 months currently.

The new legislation will provide a legal basis for transmitting annual gender pay gap data, that measures the relative difference between the average hourly earnings of men versus women. 

Concerning the structure of labour costs, the current four-yearly collection of aggregated data will be extended to cover NACE Rev.2.1 section P; 'Public administration and defence; compulsory social security'.

For the labour cost index, early estimates will be collected from EU countries representing more than 3% of all EU employees, 45 days after the reference quarter, to compile EU totals. The transmission deadline for final data, collected from all EU countries, will be shortened from 75 to 65 days after the reference quarter. 

As regards job vacancies, the coverage of micro-enterprises with less than 10 employees and NACE Rev.2.1 section P: 'Public administration and defence; compulsory social security' will be generalized to all EU countries. 

Data under the modernized LMB framework will start being transmitted for reference periods starting in 2026 for the structure of earnings, Q1-2027 for the labour cost index and job vacancies, 2027 for the gender pay gap and 2028 for the structure of labour costs. 

Deadlines for transmitting the data will be: May 2027 for the flash JVS/LCI, June 2027 for final JVS/LCI, April 2028 for the structure of earnings, January 2029 for the gender pay gap and June 2030 for the structure of labour costs. 

THE MOTIVATION

Labour market statistics on businesses (LMB) are official statistics that describe businesses functioning in relation to labour markets. The areas covered mostly relate to level and composition of labour costs, distribution and structure of earnings, labour cost index, and job vacancy statistics. 

LMB statistics are relevant to policymaking in various areas including macroeconomic convergence, social cohesion, price stability, gender equality, pay transparency and adequate minimum wages. They are used to compile indicators for monitoring the European employment strategy, the European Pillar of Social Rights, the European Semester and the social economy action plan. 

Both the labour cost index and the job vacancy rate are in the list of the Principal Economic Indicators for the Euro monitoring. 

The gender pay gap (GPG) is listed under Goal 5 of Sustainable Development indicators: 'gender equality'. 

The strengths of LMB lie in their coherence, efficiency, comparability and the fact that they are well established, reliable and widely used by organisations and policy makers at all levels. Moreover, no alternative data at the EU or wider level exist. 

However, the impact assessment conducted by the European Commission showed that some user needs were not fully met. 

For instance, the monitoring of Directive (EU) 2022/2041 on adequate minimum wages requires unbiased estimates of the median wages as a (country-specific) benchmark. This necessitates that structure of earnings data cover all segments of the economy, including entreprises with less than 9 employees and the public sector, whose importance varies across EU countries.

Moreover, the lack of a legal obligation to provide information on gender pay gap (GPG) became more problematic as the current data collection is voluntary and does not cover all EU countries nor all GPG variables. This brings a risk factor for the monitoring of principle 2 ('Gender equality') of the European Pillar of Social Rights. 

Furthermore, recent variations in prices and labour costs have shown the importance of improving the timeliness of the Labour Cost Index to better serve monetary policy needs. 

The impact assessment also suggested developing harmonized precision targets, for better accuracy, as well as using administrative and other novel sources to further improve the LMB relevance without increasing the response burden. 

Finally, recent innovations such as web-scraping opened the way for compiling more breakdowns on labour demand (job vacancy statistics) with no increase in the response burden.