The number of people attending their workplace has returned to pre-pandemic levels for the first time since a spike in remote work during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the latest Central Statistics Office (CSO) Labour Force Survey (LFS) published on Thursday.
In the fourth quarter of 2019, the number of people working fully in-person stood at 1.861 million. After dropping to just 1.43 million at the end of 2020, that figure rebounded to 1.866 million people at the end of 2025. This came after a 4.1 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase.
At the same time, the number of people who do work from home fell 1.6 per cent on a quarterly basis, to 956,700 in the final quarter. This is a decrease from the 992,600 people working from home in the first three months of 2021.
This represents a significant portion of the overall labour force, or the total number of people aged from 15 to 89 years of age regardless of employment status. The labour force rose by 2.4 per cent, or 68,800 people, to 2,961,300 in the final quarter.
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Of those, the number of people with employment rose by 2 per cent, or 56,700, to 2,833,100 people in the full year.
In 2025, the age bracket with the highest employment rate was those between 45 and 54 years of age, at 85.3 per cent.
In contrast, the cohort with the rate of employment was 15 to 19-year-olds, of which just over one-in-four held employment.
The rate of employment for people aged 15-64 years was marginally higher in the final quarter of the year, than it was in the same period of 2024, at 74.5 per cent against 74.3 per cent.
Bank of Ireland’s group chief economist, Conall Mac Coille highlighted that the unemployment rate “was revised down again, to 4.6 per cent in Q4 2025, from the 5 per cent initially estimated and declining from 4.9 per cent in Q3 2025″.
“These out-turns bear out our view the labour market data during the summer was temporarily weak, due to a range of seasonal factors the CSO struggles to adjust for,” he said, pointing seasonal youth unemployment as one of the factors the bank expected to “bounce back” in the final quarter.
He said the LSF showed that the fastest growing sectors for employment through 2025 were construction, industry and “public sector dominated areas such as education and health”.
Mac Coille noted that the LSF found that employment in the information and communications technology sector was down 7 per cent to 184,000, but that this “doesn’t tally” with other measures. He suggested “the LFS reading may reflect volatility in the data and overstate the contraction in ICT sector employment”.
Kate English, chief economist at Deloitte Ireland said, “Although improved from Q3’s surprise sharp fall, the labour market has entered a new phase of its cycle and it is reaffirming expectations of more moderate economic growth in Ireland in 2026.”
