News articles

In the first quarter of 2026, the employment rate of people aged 20-64 in the EU stood at 76.3%, up from 76.2% in the fourth quarter of 2025. Labour market slack – all persons who have an unmet need for employment, including unemployed people – stood at 10.9% of the extended labour force aged 20-...

In 2025, 63.6% of enterprises in the EU with 10 or more employees used any type of social media, up from 61.1% in 2023.  Enterprises use social media for example to increase their online presence, improve marketing, communicate with partners, customers, and other organisations, and facilitate col...

Between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, 3 million unemployed people aged 15-74 in the EU found a job (22.9% of all unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2025). During this period, 7.1 million (53.2%) remained unemployed and 3.2 million unemployed people (23.9%) transitione...

In the first quarter of 2026, the average price of agricultural output in the EU decreased by 2.9% compared with the same quarter in 2025. This was a slightly higher rate of decline than that of the last quarter of 2025 (-1.7%).  The average price of agricultural inputs (goods and services consum...

In 2025, the unemployment rate in the EU was 6.0% for people aged 15-74 in the labour force, up slightly from 5.9% in 2024.  Among EU countries, Spain had the highest unemployment rate at 10.5%, followed by Finland (9.7%) and Greece (8.9%). The lowest rates were in Czechia (2.8%), Poland and Malt...

In 2024, EU households used 9.54 million terajoules of energy, a slight decline (-0.2%) from 9.57 million terajoules in 2023. Energy use in households has been decreasing for 3 consecutive years, after the all-time peak of 10.98 million terajoules in 2021. Households, or the residential sector, r...

On 30 April 2026, a total of 4.37 million non-EU citizens who fled Ukraine had temporary protection status in the EU. Compared with the end of March 2026, the total number of people from Ukraine under temporary protection increased by 42 990 (+1.0%). The EU countries hosting the highest number of...

The 2026 edition of Key figures on European business brings together all the key data on business activities and structure, investment, productivity, globalisation, technology and tourism. Today, we focus on the trade in wind turbines, as analysing the EU’s production and trade of green energy pr...

In 2024, 21.3% of EU enterprises engaged in international (intra-EU and extra-EU) trade in goods were two-way traders, while 70.6% were solely importers and the remaining 8.1% were exporters. In terms of value, two-way traders accounted for the vast majority (95.4%) of all goods traded, ahead of ...

In 2025, the EU exported 2.7 thousand tonnes of shark fins to countries outside the EU, worth €44.8 million. Compared with 2024, the export volume decreased by 15.2% (from 3.1 thousand tonnes), and the export value dropped by 31.3% (from €65.3 million).  These decreases followed a steep rise betw...

Across the EU, the structure of general government gross debt differs significantly between countries. These differences relate for example to the initial and remaining maturity of debt, the debt instruments used and the main institutional sectors holding the debt. However, when considering the c...