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According to Statistics Estonia, the unemployment rate was 6.5% and the employment rate was 66.9% in the 2nd quarter of 2015. The number of persons active in the labour market exceeded 700,000 for the first time.
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Absolute poverty means that a person’s income is below the absolute poverty threshold. The threshold is calculated on the basis of equivalised disposable income that takes into account the composition of the household (the weight of the first adult member is 1, the weight of each additional member aged at least 14 years is 0.7 and the weight of everyone under 14 years of age is 0.5), i.e. the total household income is divided by the sum of equivalence scales of household members. The absolute poverty threshold is the estimated subsistence minimum, which represents the financial cost of meeting
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Open borders and the ability to choose where to live have made people more mobile. People move from city to city, to the countryside or even find a new job and home outside Estonia. How actively do Estonian people change their place of residence? How many migrants have found a new home in Estonia? Migration statistics provide an overview of internal migration, or movement from one administrative unit to another within Estonia, and external migration, or cross-border changes of residence. Migration is a vital event that can quickly change the age and sex distribution of the population. In
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Epp Remmelg, leading analyst at Statistics Estonia, said that life expectancy has shown a steady uptrend in Estonia, with the exception of the pandemic years. “Last year, compared with 2024, life expectancy increased by 0.5 years for men and by 0.1 years for women,” said Remmelg. She added that since 1995, when life expectancy at birth was 67.6 years, it has increased by 12.2 years and reached 79.8 years in 2025. Life expectancy in Latvia and Lithuania has been lower than in Estonia – in 2024, it was 77.5 years in Lithuania and 76.4 years in Latvia. Latvia has the one of the lowest life
The unemployment rate was 7.5% last year
Date 16.02.2026
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Tea Vassiljeva, analyst at Statistics Estonia, explained that the unemployment rate, i.e. the share of the unemployed in the labour force, was 7.5% last year, which is just 0.1 percentage points lower than in 2024. In 2025, the average number of the unemployed was 56,200 – this is down by 900 from the year before. Unemployment grew the most among young men “Unemployment decreased among women but increased among men. Women’s unemployment rate, which was 7.5% in 2024, dropped to 6.6% in 2025. As for men, their unemployment rate grew by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2024 and reached 8.3% as
The unemployment rate was 7.1% in the first quarter
Date 15.05.2026
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Tea Vassiljeva, analyst at Statistics Estonia, said that, in the first quarter, the labour market showed no signs of major changes in any direction. “There were 52,200 unemployed people in the first quarter, up by 5,100 from the fourth quarter of last year. This number is still significantly lower than in the first quarter of last year, when the number of unemployed people was very high,” noted Vassiljeva. The unemployment rate is the share of the unemployed in the labour force. The unemployment rate was 7.1% in the first quarter, which is 0.7 percentage points higher than in the last quarter
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Kadri Rootalu , the Population and Education Statistics Service Manager at Statistics Estonia, said that two thirds of the population decline can be attributed to negative natural increase, and one third resulted from net migration which turned negative. “In recent years, net migration had boosted the population figure and helped to offset the negative natural increase. However, in 2025, net migration turned negative after more than ten years, as emigration from Estonia exceeded immigration by 2,802,” said Rootalu. She added that the decrease in population due to negative natural increase was
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Maali Käbin, analyst at Statistics Estonia, said that information about ethnic nationality is obtained from various state registers and databases. “The main source is the population register. If this register does not specify the ethnic nationality, we rely on other national databases, such as information provided when applying for identity documents,” explained Käbin. The number of Estonians has been stable, the number of Ukrainians has increased In the period 2018–2026, the number of Estonians has been quite stable. At the same time, the number of Russians has decreased, and the number of
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What kind of survey is it? Urban Audit is a joint effort by the European Commission's Directorate General for Regional Policy (DG-REGIO), Eurostat, and European countries to collect and disseminate reliable and comparable data on the quality of life in European cities. Who commissions the survey? The survey is commissioned by Eurostat. Why are the data needed? Data are collected on key statistical domains such as population (sex-age composition, citizenship, births and deaths), social life (household structure and living conditions, housing, labour market, education, culture and leisure)
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Tea Vassiljeva, analyst at Statistics Estonia, explained that there were 64,200 unemployed persons in the first quarter of 2025, which is the highest value of this indicator in the last 12 years. “The number of the unemployed increased by 5,300 compared with the same quarter of last year. The unemployment rate rose to 8.6%, which is 0.8 percentage points more than a year earlier and 1.2 percentage points more than in the fourth quarter of last year,” noted Vassiljeva. The unemployment rate was 9% for men and 8.2% for women. “Ida-Viru county was the only region where the unemployment rate