Eurostat: Poland hits lowest unemployment rate on record and joint-lowest in EU

Keep our news free from ads and paywalls by making a donation to support our work!

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland’s unemployment rate of 2.6% in January was the lowest ever recorded in the country by the European Union’s Eurostat agency and the joint lowest among all EU member states.

However, Eurostat’s figures differ from Poland’s own official data, which are compiled using a different methodology and are not adjusted for seasonal fluctuations in employment. They show that January’s unemployment rate, while still low by historical standards, increased from December.

According to Eurostat’s January data, Poland and the Czech Republic (2.6%) had the EU’s lowest unemployment rates, followed by Malta (3%), Slovenia (3.3%) and Germany (3.5%).

Poland’s figure, which was down from 2.7% in December, was the lowest recorded by the agency since it began collecting data there in 1997.

At the other end of the scale were Spain (10.4%), Sweden (9.7%), Finland (8.9%) and Greece (8.7%) with the highest unemployment rates. Across the EU as a whole, the figure was 5.8%, unchanged from December.

“Poland with the lowest unemployment in the European Union! In these difficult times, any good news is worth its weight in gold,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X, welcoming the data.

The Eurostat figures, however, differ from those compiled by Poland’s national statistics office, Statistics Poland (GUS). According to GUS, Poland’s unemployment rate stood at 5.4% in January, up from 5.1% in December.

Despite the recent uptick, unemployment, as calculated by GUS, remains near historic lows. In June last year, it fell below 5% for the first time since 1990, when the country was beginning its post-communist transition.

The data presented by GUS are not seasonally adjusted, so in winter they traditionally show a slight increase in unemployment due to the seasonality of work in sectors such as agriculture and hospitality.

Additionally, GUS uses a different methodology than Eurostat to calculate unemployment. GUS’s unemployment rate represents the percentage of jobseekers registered with labour offices in relation to the total working-age population.

Meanwhile, Eurostat defines it as the proportion of people who are unemployed, available to work and have actively sought employment in the past four weeks, relative to the total labour force. Data for these calculations, based on among others the Labour Force Survey (LFS), is provided to Eurostat by GUS.

Experts say that Eurostat’s methodology better reflects the actual situation on the labour market, as it does not take into account “fictitious unemployment”, a situation in which an unemployed person is registered at the labour office to obtain benefits but does not plan to take up employment.

Polish media, meanwhile, report that the situation on the labour market is deteriorating for workers even beyond seasonal changes, with a growing number of layoffs across different sectors.

According to the Rzeczpospolita daily, 2024 saw the highest number of group layoffs since the outbreak of the pandemic, both in terms of those announced and those carried out.

GUS’s data and Rzeczpospolita’s calculations show that employers planned mass redundancies affecting 37,300 employees in 2024, an increase of more than one fifth compared to the previous year. The actual number of layoffs carried out in 2024 reached 27,000, nearly 60% more than in 2023.

The Interia news website, meanwhile, reports that companies declared in January 2025 plans to lay off 12,700 workers, a significant increase from the 2,500 announced layoffs in January 2024.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Ivan Samkov/Pexels

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.