Press Statement

Preasráiteas

19 May 2021

Go to release: Impact of COVID-19 Income Supports on Employees, Q4 2020 - Insights from Real Time Administrative Sources, Series 2

The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (19 May 2021) released Impact of COVID-19 Income Supports on Employees, Q4 2020. This CSO Frontier Output is the second instalment of the ‘Insights from Real Time Administrative Sources’ Series. The publication analysed the impact selected COVID-19 Income Support Schemes had on the earnings of Irish employees in 2020 in comparison to 2019 and is an example of how the CSO provides insights into Irish society by using datasets from administrative systems. This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Publication. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this experimental analysis.

Commenting on the release, Brian Cahill, Statistician, said: 

"This publication presents analysis of the impact selected COVID-19 Income Support Schemes had on the income of employees in Ireland during 2020. Employee earnings data from the Revenue Commissioners were combined with data on COVID-19 income support schemes from Revenue and the Department of Social Protection under the auspices of the Statistics Act 1993 to provide the basis for this analysis.

This report examines the extent to which employees’ median weekly earnings and income were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact selected COVID-19 income support schemes had on the income of recipient employees.

Median weekly earnings of all employees combined, which excludes COVID-19 income support, in Q4 2020 would have been level with the same period the previous year. However, when COVID-19 income supports are included, median employee income actually increased by 4.6% in the period. 

Median weekly earnings of employees who did not receive COVID-19 income supports increased annually by about 5% in the first three quarters of 2020 and by 7.1% in Q4. Median weekly income (i.e. earnings plus COVID-19 income supports) of employees who did receive COVID-19 income supports rose in the year to Q1 2020, but fell in all other quarters in the year, by 12.7% in Q2, 10.5% in Q3 and 4.8% in Q4." 

Other main results include:

• The proportion of employees who received the Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) and/or the Wage Subsidy Scheme (WSS) in a quarter rose from 13.9% of employees in Q1 2020 to almost 40% in Q2 before falling back to 30.1% in Q3 and 25.2% in Q4.
• There were annual increases in the median weekly income of employees aged under 25 in each quarter of 2020 for both those who received and did not receive COVID-19 income supports.
• The lowest earners (bottom 20%) in 2019 had the largest annual income growth in each quarter in 2020 for both employees who received supports and those who did not.
• All recipient groups of COVID-19 income supports had large falls in income in the year to Q2 2020. The scale of the fall in income reduced in Q3 and Q4 2020.
• The median income of males who received support from only the WSS fell by just 0.7% in the year to Q4 2020, compared with a drop of 18.6% for those who received only the PUP and a rise of 3.4% for those who received both the PUP and WSS in the quarter.
• For females, median earnings and COVID-19 income supports were higher in Q4 2020 for each category of support compared to the same quarter in the previous year.
• Income increased in the year to Q4 2020 for all recipient groups who were in the lowest employee earnings quintile in Q4 2019, with a rise of 54.8% for those who received PUP and WSS during the quarter, 27.0% for PUP only recipients and 19.9% for WSS only recipients. For all other quintiles, there were falls in income for each of the recipient groups, with the largest falls in the higher quintiles.
• In the year to Q2 2020, median weekly income for all employees (recipients and non-recipients) fell by 5.6%, but this decrease would have been 15.0% if no COVID-19 income supports had been available. In the year to Q4 2020, median weekly income rose by 4.6% for all employees but would have remained level with no supports. This difference illustrates the impact of COVID-19 income supports for employees in a hypothetical scenario where no job seekers benefit, or allowance was available.
• Without COVID-19 income supports, the share of all employees earning less than €300 a week would have increased from 16.6% to 24.1% between Q4 2019 and Q4 2020. With supports, the share of all employees earning less than €300 a week actually dropped from 16.6% to 12.5%, a fall of 4.1 percentage points.

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