This publication 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.
As this release is part of the CSO frontier series we have updated the methodology used in our Primary Employment Separations Analysis (Table 2.3b and PxStat Table JCQ05) following feedback from users. This will better track the movement of primary employments and negate the effects of a change in a person’s primary employment within the reference period.
The NACE sectors of a number of enterprises have been updated and reassigned to allow for more coherence with other Labour Market and Earnings products e.g. Earnings Analysis using Administrative Data Sources.
Job churn in Quarter 2 (Q2) 2024 was 323,356, down 30,624 (8.7%) from Q2 2023. The associated job churn rate for Q2 2024 was 11.5%, down 1.5 percentage points from the 13.0% recorded a year earlier.
The total number of jobs created in Q2 2024 was 175,612, an increase of 5,620 (3.3%) when compared with Q2 2023.
There were 84,662 job destructions in Q2 2024, which was 632 (-0.7%) fewer than the number recorded 12 months earlier.
The 337,290 hirings recorded in Q2 2024 were 9,692 (-2.8%) fewer than the 346,982 observed in Q2 2023.
In Q2 2024 a total of 246,340 job separations were recorded, down 15,944 (-6.1%) from the 262,284 observed in Q2 2023.
There were 125,181 separations from primary employments in Q2 2024. Of these, 87,839 (70.2%) people were no longer on the Revenue PMOD system, 24,312 (19.4%) were employed but in a different economic sector, and 13,030 (10.4%) remained employed in the same economic sector but with a different organisation or company.
There were 2,499,396 people who stayed in their current employment, or stayers, in Q2 2024. This was the highest figure for stayers in the current series.
Job churn: This 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. In simpler terms, it is a measure of employee turnover providing insight into the number of employees who changed job and stayed in the same job.
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 is 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 | % | ||||
| Q2 2023 | 169,992 | 85,294 | 353,980 | 13.0 | |
| Q1 2024 | 114,278 | 118,398 | 327,036 | 11.8 | |
| Q2 2024 | 175,612 | 84,662 | 323,356 | 11.5 | |
| Quarterly Change | 61,334 | -33,736 | -3,680 | -0.3 | |
| Annual Change | 5,620 | -632 | -30,624 | -1.5 | |
| Source: CSO Labour Market Churn | |||||
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Statistician's Comment
The Central Statistics Office (CSO) has today (26 September 2024) issued Labour Market Churn results for Q2 2024.
Labour Market Churn is a Frontier publication. It 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 taking up new jobs. It also provides breakdowns of the employee turnover figures by economic sector and firm size.
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 left PMOD employment.
The series covers the time period from Q2 2020 to the current quarter, Q2 2024. For definitions of the terminology used in the release, please see the Editor's Note.
Commenting on today’s release, Conor Delves, Statistician in the Labour Market Analysis Section, said: “The job churn figure for Q2 2024 was 323,356, which was a decrease of 30,624 from Q2 2023. The job churn rate, that is the job churn figure relative to total employment, for Q2 2024 was 11.5%, down 1.5 percentage points from the 13.0% recorded in Q2 2023.
There were 175,612 job creations in Q2 2024 and 84,662 job destructions in the same period.
In Q2 2024, 11.9% of employees were no longer in an employment that they held in the previous quarter.
The largest year-on-year increase in job creations in Q2 2024 were seen in Human Health & Social Work Activities, where creations were up 41.5% to 17,043 and Public Administration & Defence, where creations rose 124.8% to 7,309.
In Q2 2024, the highest job churn rate was recorded in the Administrative & Support Service sector (26.6%), while the lowest rate (6.3%) was recorded in the Information & Communication sector.
The firm size group that saw the highest job churn rate in Q2 2024 was those employing 50-249 people (15.4%). The lowest job churn rate in the quarter was in firms with between one and nine employees (5.8%)."