The Global Disability Employment Gap: OECD, ILO and WHO Data and What It Tells Us

The Scale of the Gap

The disability employment gap — the percentage-point difference in employment rates between people with and without disabilities — is one of the most persistent structural features of labour markets. It matters for a very large population: the World Health Organization estimates that 1.3 billion people — about 16% of the world's population, or 1 in 6 — experience significant disability. WHO identifies exclusion from employment as one of the structural barriers that drive health inequities for persons with disabilities.

The most current harmonised data for a large group of countries comes from the European Union. According to the EU's Joint Employment Report 2026 (based on Eurostat EU-SILC data for people aged 20–64):

The report describes the labour market inclusion of persons with disabilities as having deteriorated at EU level in 2024.

Country Variation

The gap is not uniform. In the EU in 2024, according to the Joint Employment Report 2026:

• The gap was above 20 percentage points in every Member State except one — Slovenia, the "best performer", where it fell by 3.1 points to 14.2.
• In Romania, Croatia, Lithuania, Ireland, Poland, Bulgaria and Belgium the gap exceeded 30 percentage points. Belgium recorded a gap of 33.1 points.
• Croatia, Ireland and Poland recorded increases along with large gaps of over 35 points.
• Austria and the Netherlands made some progress and are among the countries "better than average", along with Czechia, Estonia, Germany, Finland, France and Latvia.

Variation of this size suggests that policy, institutions and labour market structure matter — but the next section explains why country rankings should be read with care.

Why Cross-Country Comparisons Need Care

Disability employment figures depend heavily on how disability is measured.

• Breaks in statistical series. The Joint Employment Report notes that Denmark, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Romania all reported breaks in series in 2024, and the gap increased in all five. In Italy, for example, the gap changed from 15.9 to 25.1 points after the break — a change that does not allow a correct economic interpretation, and which alone accounts for around half of the change at EU level.
• Self-reported disability. An OECD working paper (2025) points out that most measures rely on people reporting whether a health condition limits their day-to-day activities. These measures are poorly comparable across countries and over time, because how likely people are to report a disability is affected by their environment — and a successful policy may even change how people report disability in ways that make the gap look worse.
• Better measures. The OECD paper recommends complementing the conventional gap with a prevalence-adjusted gap, and building scales from specific questions on impairments and activity limitations. Using these more robust methods, it observes that countries with lower overall employment rates often have lower disability employment gaps — and asks how some countries manage to combine high disability employment rates with low gaps.

The ILO makes a similar point from a global perspective: across the 65 countries in a 2024 study, the share of people with disabilities in the working-age population ranged from less than 1% to over 13%, reflecting differences in perception, culture and awareness as well as measurement differences between surveys.

Global Evidence from the ILO

An ILO working paper (Ananian and Dellaferrera, 2024) analysed national household surveys from 65 countries covering all regions and levels of economic development. It found that:

• Participation: having disabilities decreases the likelihood of labour market participation by 29 percentage points for men and 20 percentage points for women on average, even after controlling for age and education.
• Unemployment: when they do participate, people with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed — by 8 percentage points for men and 7 for women. The unemployment gap appears narrower in developing countries.
• Pay: across the 30 countries with wage data, employees with disabilities earn 12% less per hour than their counterparts without disabilities, and three quarters of this gap is not explained by differences in education, age and occupation. The gap reaches 26% in low- and lower-middle-income countries and is 9% in developed countries.
• Gender: where pay can be broken down by sex, women with disabilities appear to earn less on average than men with disabilities.

Structure of the Gap

By Education

Employees with disabilities tend to have lower educational attainment: across the 30 countries in the ILO wage subsample, 38% of employees with disabilities had not attained secondary school level, compared with 28% of other employees. The ILO links this to the barriers people with disabilities may face in accessing education early in life.

By Occupation

Workers with disabilities are over-represented in elementary occupations (24% versus 16% for employees without disabilities) and under-represented among managers, professionals and technicians (28% versus 38%).

By Working Pattern

Workers with disabilities more often work short hours: 13% work fewer than 20 hours a week, 5 percentage points more than other workers. In developing countries they are also more often on temporary contracts (44% versus 38%).

Causes of the Gap

The evidence identifies both supply-side and demand-side causes.

Supply-Side (Individual)

• Health conditions directly limiting work capacity
• Lower educational attainment (partly caused by inaccessible education systems)
• Benefit systems in which the financial gain from work may be small

Demand-Side (Employer)

• Statistical discrimination: employers base hiring decisions on assumptions about the productivity of the group a candidate belongs to, rather than assessing the individual
• Overstated accommodation costs: the ILO notes that employers often overstate the cost of providing workplace accommodations
• Inaccessible recruitment: application, interview and selection processes — including online recruitment — that are not accessible to disabled candidates
• Inaccessible workplaces: physical environments, digital systems and work processes that are not adapted

Field experiments — usually covering physical disabilities in developed countries — have provided evidence that labour market discrimination against people with disabilities exists, as summarised by the ILO.

Institutional

• Passive benefit design that weakens the financial incentive to seek work
• Insufficient capacity in supported employment services
• Vocational rehabilitation focused on treatment rather than job placement
• Anti-discrimination law that is weakly enforced

What Works: The Evidence

Individual Placement and Support (IPS / supported employment): IPS — rapid job search for competitive employment with ongoing support — is an evidence-based model originally developed for working-age adults with serious mental illness. A 2023 systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials for young adults with mental health conditions (Bond et al.) found that all seven included studies showed a significantly higher employment rate for IPS: 58.3% of IPS participants were competitively employed during follow-up, compared with 32.4% of control participants.

Other measures: Wage subsidies, employer-facing accommodation funds, early intervention during sickness absence, employment quotas and voluntary employer schemes are all widely used. Their effectiveness depends heavily on design — for example on how well they are targeted, whether they are combined with practical support, and how they are enforced — so policy makers should look for evaluations of the specific programme rather than assume that a measure works everywhere.

Sources

• World Health Organization (2023): Disability (fact sheet) — https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health
• European Commission / Council of the EU (2026): Joint Employment Report 2026 — https://employment-social-affairs.ec.europa.eu/joint-employment-report-2026_en
• Eurostat (2025): Employment gaps for women & people with disabilities — https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20250527-1
• OECD (2025): Geiger, B. and Prinz, C., Measuring disability employment gaps: How to get robust comparisons across countries and over time, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 314 — https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2025/12/measuring-disability-employment-gaps_3d4a31d3/2d0be829-en.pdf
• ILO (2024): Ananian, S. and Dellaferrera, G., A study on the employment and wage outcomes of people with disabilities, ILO Working Paper 124 — https://www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/2024-08/WP124_web.pdf
• Bond, G.R. et al. (2023): A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of IPS Supported Employment for Young Adults with Mental Health Conditions, Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research 50:160–172 — https://ipsworks.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/23-bond-systematic-review-of-IPS-for-young-adults-1.pdf