Europe's Missing Workers: Who Is Outside the EU Labour Market

The Measurement Problem

Europe's headline unemployment statistics capture only part of labour market exclusion. The ILO definition of unemployment — not working, actively seeking work, and immediately available — leaves out many people who want to work but are not looking, and many more who are outside the labour market for reasons of health or disability.

Eurostat publishes several series that, read together, show a wider picture:

| Category | EU-27 (2024 unless stated) |

|---|---|

| Unemployed (ILO definition, ages 15–74; Eurostat une_rt_a) | 13.1 million |

| Available to work but not seeking (ages 15–74; Eurostat lfsi_sup_a) | 6.2 million |

| NEET (15–29, not in employment, education or training; Eurostat lfsi_neet_a) | 8.0 million (11.1%) |

| Disability pension beneficiaries (all ages, 2023; Eurostat spr_pns_ben) | 12.6 million |

All figures in this table come from published Eurostat series (une_rt_a, lfsi_sup_a, lfsi_neet_a, spr_pns_ben). The groups overlap and cover different age ranges, so they should not be added together.

In total, 70.1 million people aged 15–64 in the EU were outside the labour force in 2024 (Eurostat lfsa_pganws). That figure includes students, carers and others who are not looking for work, so it is not a measure of exclusion on its own.

The Disability Benefit Dimension

Across the EU-27, 12.6 million people received a disability pension in 2023, according to Eurostat's social protection statistics (spr_pns_ben). The figure covers all ages and pensions classified as disability pensions, so national definitions differ. The EU total has been roughly flat in recent years (12.7 million in 2020, 12.6 million in 2023), but national trends differ sharply:

• Rising caseloads: In Ireland, recipients of Disability Allowance rose from 120,587 at the end of 2015 to 176,602 in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of about 46% (CSO, table DSP02). Over the same period, the number on Invalidity Pension stayed roughly flat (56,345 to 55,702). The Netherlands has also seen a marked rise: an average of 809,000 people received a work-incapacity benefit in 2024, the highest level since the series began in 2008 (CBS).
• Declining caseloads: Finland's disability pension caseload has fallen — according to the Finnish Centre for Pensions (Eläketurvakeskus), the number of disability pension recipients dropped from around 218,000 in 2015 to around 173,000 in 2025, a decline of roughly 21%. Sweden's disability claims fell considerably after a series of sickness and disability reforms from 2006 onwards, which included stricter eligibility criteria for disability pensions (OECD, 2020).

In most OECD countries, mental health conditions have become the biggest driver of new disability benefit claims, overtaking musculoskeletal conditions, and their share is rising almost everywhere (OECD, 2020).

What the Evidence Says About Solutions

Individual Placement and Support (IPS): A 2023 systematic review by the Norwegian Institute of Public Health pooled 28 randomised trials, mainly from the US and Europe. It found that people with mental disorders who received IPS were about twice as likely to get a job as those who received other services (relative risk 2.02), although the review rated its confidence in this result as low.

The European Disability Employment Strategy

The European Commission's Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030 calls on member states to set, by 2024, national targets for raising the employment rate of persons with disabilities and narrowing the gap with persons without disabilities. The Strategy does not set a single EU-wide percentage-point target.

In 2024, the EU-wide disability employment gap was 24.0 percentage points (Eurostat, hlth_dlm200). The size of the gap depends heavily on how disability is measured: in 2024 it was 16.0 points for people with some activity limitation and 45.5 points for people with severe limitation (Eurostat, hlth_dlm200).

Closing a gap of this size — which has stayed between 21 and 25 percentage points since Eurostat's series began in 2014 — would require sustained policy effort at a scale not yet evident in most member states.

Legislative frameworks have improved, notably through the European Accessibility Act, which member states had to write into national law by June 2022. Yet measured employment outcomes have not improved at EU level: the disability employment gap was 23.1 percentage points in 2021 and 24.0 in 2024 (European Commission, 2026).

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Sources: Eurostat — unemployment (une_rt_a), labour market slack (lfsi_sup_a), NEET (lfsi_neet_a, edat_lfse_20), population by labour status (lfsa_pganws), disability pension beneficiaries (spr_pns_ben), disability employment gap (hlth_dlm200, tepsr_sp200); Finnish Centre for Pensions, Statistics on pensioners in Finland (2026); CSO Ireland, table DSP02; CBS, De arbeidsmarkt in cijfers 2024; OECD, Sickness and disability systems (ECO/WKP(2020)9); Norwegian Institute of Public Health, IPS systematic review (2023); European Commission, Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities 2021–2030 (COM(2021) 101) and Enhancing the strategy up to 2030 (COM(2026) 541).