In total, 12,240 jobs were vacant in the Icelandic labour market in the second quarter of 2022 according to Statistics Iceland’s Job Vacancy Survey. At the same time, the number of occupied jobs was 229,148 and the job vacancy rate therefore 5.1% (see confidence intervals in table). This is the highest quarterly measure of the vacancy rate since the first quarter of 2019, when the Job Vacancy Survey was first conducted in Iceland.
The demand for employees was highest in hotel and restaurant operations, in fish farming and for the local governments. The job vacancy rate was the highest in economic activities G-I, Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; transportation and storage; accommodation and food service activities or 9.2%. In economic activity A, Agriculture, forestry and fishing, the vacancy rate was 8.8% and 8.2% in M-N, Professional, scientific and technical activities; administrative and support service activities. The job vacancy rate in the tourism industry was 8.1%.
Comparison with the second quarter of 2021 shows that the number of job vacancies increased by 3,200 between years, the number of manned job positions increased by around 21,700 and the job vacancy rate increased by 0.9 percentage points, a statistically significant increase.
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 Iceland with more than one employee. The sample is constructed once every year, at the beginning of the year, from a sampling frame listing all legal entities in the year before. The reference date for the first quarter of 2022 was 15 May and the response rate was 98.4%.
Information about the number of occupied jobs comes from register data which is constantly revised and updated. To minimize unnecessary fluctuation and changes to the time-series, figures about occupied jobs are fixed when twelve months have passed from the reference period of the results. Statistics Iceland intends to revise the figures every three years if any remarkable changes are seen in older figures.
When interpreting the results of vacant jobs and the job vacancy rate, it is important to keep in mind that they are built on a sample survey at a given reference period. Therefore, the results should be interpreted by taking the 95% confidence intervals into consideration.