In total, 3,460 jobs were vacant in the Icelandic labour market in the fourth quarter of 2025, according to Statistics Iceland’s Job Vacancy survey. At the same time, about 241,802 jobs were occupied and the job vacancy rate was 1.4% (see confidence interval in table).
The number of vacant jobs decreased by 1,800 between quarters and the job vacancy rate decreased by 0.7 percentage points. Comparison with the fourth quarter of 2024 shows that the number of vacant jobs decreased by 460 between years and the job vacancy rate decreased by 0.2 percentage points.
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 one or more employees at the reference date of the survey. The sample is selected annually at the beginning of the year from a sampling frame listing all legal entities from the previous year, based on Statistics Iceland’s business registry. The reference date for the fourth quarter of 2025 was 15 November. A total of 635 responses were received, with a response rate of 93.0%. The results are preliminary and will be revised.
Information on the number of occupied jobs comes from registered data which is constantly revised and updated. To minimise changes to the time series, figures about occupied jobs are fixed when twelve months have passed since the reference period of the results. Statistics Iceland intends to revise the figures every three years if significant changes are visible 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 for a given reference period. Therefore, the results should be interpreted by taking the 95% confidence intervals into consideration.