Labour Force Survey 2024, 2nd Quarter

Statistics Norway established the Labor Force Survey (LFS) in 1972, and it has been conducted quarterly ever since. The LFS measures the population's participation in the labor market and provides comprehensive information on unemployment, employment, people outside the labor force, temporary employees, underemployed and other subgroups that are not captured by register-based statistics. This makes the LFS one of the most important sources of information about conditions in the Norwegian labor market.

Right from the start, the aim has been to ensure that the survey is comparable with similar surveys internationally. Today, the LFS is designed in accordance with the EU's statistical regulations to ensure consistent and comparable European statistics. The LFS data contains long time series, and although there have been some breaks in the time series due to changes in the questionnaire and data collection, the most central variables have been continuously included since the start. This makes it possible to present time series data for the employed, unemployed and people outside the labor force all the way back to 1972.

The dataset consists of a single quarter, along with a quarterly weight. The dataset should be used for a quarterly average rather than an annual distribution. If an annual average is desired, separate datasets are available.

2021 (first quarter): The number of persons in employment increased by 22 000 and the number of unemployed increased by 5 000, as a consequence of the new EU LFS regulation. The production system was revised in full, with changes in sampling, weighting, use of register data, and a new questionnaire.