More than one in 10 workers in Ireland changed jobs in the first quarter according to new figures from the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
Using Revenue’s PAYE data, the CSO said the country’s job churn rate was 11.8%, down 0.8 percentage points on the first three months of 2023. The churn rate measures employee turnover using the number of employees who changed jobs and stayed in the same job.
The CSO said that in the first quarter of this year, 323,734 people were no longer in employment that they held in the previous quarter.
The total number of jobs created in the first quarter was 101,767 a decrease of just 34 when compared with the same period last year. This was the lowest number of job creations since the middle of 2020.
Of the 235,489 people who left a company’s employment in the first quarter, just under 46% are no longer on the Revenue system. The CSO said 35% were employed but in a different economic sector, and 19% remained employed in the same economic sector but with a different organisation or company.
Conor Delves, CSO statistician in the labour market analysis section, said the largest year-on-year increase in job creations in Q1 2024 was seen in public administration & defence, where job creations were up 114.9% to 7,817 and education, where creations rose 95% to 7,676.
“In Q1 2024, the highest job churn rate was recorded in the administrative & support service sector (24.9%), while the lowest rate (7.3%) was recorded in the industry sector,” he said.
Companies with between 50 and 249 employees saw the highest churn rate at 14.4% while small firms, of less than 10 employees saw the lowest churn rate of 6.1%.