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This release is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
To publish Labour Market Churn (LMC) in a timelier manner and to better align with our National Accounts Division’s “Quarterly National Accounts” release, LMC Q1 2025 and subsequent releases will be produced using an earlier version of Revenue’s PAYE Modernisation (PMOD) data. Due to this change reference quarter data will be released provisionally and finalised in the subsequent release. Provisional data may be subject to larger revisions than previously experienced. Finalised figures will continue to be subject to the yearly revision of PMOD data.
Job churn in Q1 2025 was 313,274, down 5,792 (1.8%) from Q1 2024. The associated job churn rate for Q1 2025 was 11.1%, down 0.3 percentage points from the 11.4% recorded a year earlier.
The total number of jobs created in Q1 2025 was 100,856, a decrease of 24,915 (19.8%) when compared with Q1 2024.
There were 133,538 job destructions in Q1 2025, which was 5,755 (4.5%) more than the number recorded 12 months earlier.
The 257,493 hirings recorded in Q1 2025 were 27,811 (9.7%) less than the 285,304 observed in Q1 2024.
In Q1 2025 a total of 290,175 job separations were recorded, up 2,859 (1.0%) from the 287,316 observed in Q1 2024.
There were 144,816 separations from primary employments in Q1 2025. Of these, 106,317 (73.4%) people were no longer on the Revenue PAYE Modernisation (PMOD) system, 24,969 (17.2%) were employed but in a different economic sector, and 13,530 (9.3%) remained employed in the same economic sector but with a different organisation or company.
There were 2,544,459 people who stayed in their current employment, or stayers, in Q1 2025, up 81,919 (3.3%) from the 2,462,540 observed in Q1 2024. The Q1 2025 figure for stayers is the highest in the series.
Labour Market Churn is part of the CSO's Frontier Series of releases. It uses Revenue PMOD data to provide insights on employee turnover within the labour. In addition, while the release does not capture the reasons behind employee job moves, it does detail whether job leavers remained employed in the same economic sector, a different sector, or have left PMOD employment.
The series covers the time period from Q2 2020 to the end of the current quarter, Q1 2025.
Job churn: Is a measure of employee turnover providing insight into the number of employees who changed job and stayed in the same job. It is a measure of employee turnover that captures employee job matches over and above the minimum that would be required to accommodate total labour market growth or decline.
Job churn rate: Measures job churn relative to total employment.
Stayers: People who remain in the same job are referred to as stayers; those who take up a new employment are referred to as hirings; and those who leave an employment are called separations.
Total employments: A combination of stayers and hirings.
Job creations: If an enterprise has more hirings than separations in a quarter, then it is said to have had job creations, with the net difference between hirings and separations being the number of job creations. Example:
Job destructions: Conversely, if an enterprise has more separations than hirings in a quarter, then it is said to have had job destructions, with the net difference between separations and hirings being the number of job destructions. Example:
Job creations and job destructions are a net figure based on hirings and separations at enterprise level. In each time period, an enterprise experiences either job creations, no change, or job destructions.
Primary employment: This refers to the main job of employees who have more than one employment. The Background Notes has more information.
| Table 1.1 Job Creation, Destruction, Churn, and Churn Rate | |||||
| Job Creation | Job Destruction | Job Churn | Job Churn Rate | ||
| Number | % | ||||
| Q1 2024 | 125,771 | 127,783 | 319,066 | 11.4 | |
| Q4 2024 | 121,786 | 153,395 | 378,330 | 13.3 | |
| Q1 2025 | 100,856 | 133,538 | 313,274 | 11.1 | |
| Quarterly Change (pp1) | -20,930 | -19,857 | -65,056 | -2.2 | |
| Annual Change (pp) | -24,915 | 5,755 | -5,792 | -0.3 | |
| Source: CSO Labour Market Churn | |||||
| 1pp refers to percentage point change | |||||
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Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (04 June 2025) published Labour Market Churn results for Q1 2025.
Labour Market Churn is part of the CSO's Frontier Series of releases, which means care must be taken when interpreting these results as methodologies may change and data sources may be incomplete.
This release uses Revenue PMOD data to provide insights on employee turnover within the labour market. The release contains figures on employees who stay in their current job, those who leave an employment, and those who take up new jobs. It also provides breakdowns of the employee turnover figures by economic sector and firm size. For more information and definitions of the terminology used in the release, please see the Editor's Note below.
Commenting on today’s release, Conor Delves, Statistician in the Labour Market Analysis Section, said: “The job churn figure for Q1 2025 was 313,274, which was a decrease of 5,792 from Q1 2024. The job churn rate, that is the job churn figure relative to total employment, for Q1 2025 was 11.1%, down 0.3 percentage points from the 11.4% recorded in Q1 2024.
There were 100,856 job creations in Q1 2025 and 133,538 job destructions in the same period.
Two sectors saw an annual increase in the number of job creations in Q1 2025. These were seen in Information & Communication where creations were up 26.0% to 6,121 and Financial, Insurance & Real Estate Activities, where creations rose 2.2% to 5,547.
In Q1 2025, the highest job churn rate was recorded in the Administrative & Support Service sector (22.9%), while the lowest rate (6.8%) was recorded in Financial, Insurance & Real Estate Activities and Information & Communications.
The firm size group that saw the highest job churn rate in Q1 2025 was those employing 50-249 people (13.3%). The lowest job churn rate in the quarter was in firms with between one and nine employees (5.8%)."