The extraordinary changes in the Irish jobs market since the Covid pandemic have been underlined in a new publication by the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Foreign nationals have been central to this, filling six out of every 10 new jobs created in the big post-pandemic labour market surge. This increase in immigration has added to demand for houses and Government services, but has also been central to the operation of many sectors, particularly healthcare, IT, accommodation and hospitality, and the administration and support services sector.
The projections by the CSO – and earlier work by the Department of Finance and others – have shown that immigration will remain central in the jobs market in the years ahead, as the population ages and more of the existing workforce move into retirement. However, in the short term an interesting question will be whether a slowing in the market – and a fall in employment in the IT sector – will have an impact on the number of people coming to Ireland to work.
The topline numbers
Total employment in the economy is now close to 2.8 million, as shown in the latest labour force data from the CSO.
However, the more interesting detailed breakdowns in the CSO release earlier in the week entitled Business in Ireland 2025 related to employees – basically people taxed as PAYE – of which there were 2.54 million at the end of 2024. The big surge in immigration after Covid meant that the number of foreign employees in the State rose by 218,000 between 2019 and 2024, representing 61 per cent of all jobs growth. Before the pandemic hit just under 22 per cent of employees in Ireland were foreign nationals. By the end of 2024 this had risen to 27.5 per cent. Foreign national employment rose by 45.6 per cent between 2019 and 2024, while the employment of Irish nationals rose by 8 per cent. A central part of the surge in the jobs market after Covid has therefore been a rise in people coming to Ireland to fill vacancies here.
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When we look at the entire jobs market -including the self-employed - the percentage of foreign nationals falls to just over 21 per cent. This reflects the fact that self-employment, which including the farming sector, has a much higher proportion of Irish nationals.
As unemployment has remained at very low levels, it is clear that foreign nationals are meeting a demand for labour which cannot be filled by the native labour force – part of the story is that some may also have skills or experience not available here. Immigrants coming to work here are, on average, a bit younger than the Irish national population. The inflow – which has exceeded emigration by Irish nationals – has also added to demand in the economy, including for scarce resources like housing. However, it is clearly central to the operation and growth of many sectors.
The breakdown – nationality
Two trends stand out in terms of the nationality of immigrant employees when we compared 2024 to 2019. One is the increase in people from Ukraine, of which 26,419 were in the workforce by 2024, compared to 2,162 in 2019.
However, the most notable increase in terms of raw numbers has been people from India, with 79,632 in employment here at the end of 2024 compared to 23,223 at the end of 2024. Another notable increase has been from Brazil, rising from 28,410 to 49,233 over the same period. The number of Poles working here has fallen off a bit, though remains over 80,000, while there were also notable rises from Romania, Italy and Spain.
The breakdown – sectors
Some sectors are highly reliant on a foreign national workforce. These include administrative and support services – a broad category that covers admin jobs, security and tech support – where 45.6 per cent were foreign nationals at the end of 2024, as well as accommodation and food services (45.1 per cent) and information and communications (41.4 per cent). Looking at who fills these jobs, the CSO figures show that, for example, nearly a third of Indians working here are employed in health and social work, with 14 per cent in ICT and 10 per cent in professional, scientific and technical activities, which includes areas like professional services, research and engineering. Brazilian people tend to be employed in accommodation and food services and the admin sector. Longer established populations, such as people from Poland, many of whom arrived in the early 2000s, have a wider spread of employment and many are working in the wholesale and retail sectors. Ukrainians have, in particular, found employment in accommodation and food services, and in the wholesale and retail industries.
The short-term future
The latest labour force figures from the CSO, published on Thursday, indicate that the jobs market has cooled, with a small fall in total recorded workers between the final quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of this year. Given the large scale of the survey – and other CSO data drawn from Revenue records and other sources – a fair representation of the picture is that the jobs market has stalled, with uncertainty in areas such as tech and ongoing growth in others, such as construction.
Will this lead to a fall in the number of those coming to work here, particularly in the tech sector, which is clearly going through a retrenchment? It could do.
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Job permit data so far this year – relating to employees coming from countries outside the UK and EU – for the sector is pretty much in line with last year in the four months to April, though well down on the immediate post-Covid hiring boom. However, we have seen in the past how quickly the Irish jobs market can swing, so this is an area worth keeping a close eye on. If the jobs market were to turn down, this would quickly be reflected in immigration data.
The longer term future
Population projections from the CSO and work by the Department of Finance and others all point to a continued flow of labour coming to Ireland from overseas in the years ahead. The Irish population is ageing – and so the proportion of people in the workforce will fall. And so the assumption is that there will be a continued flow of people coming from overseas and that this will outnumber the total of Irish people leaving to live overseas. As they like to say, net migration will continue. In fact, the scale of this flow is the key uncertainty in forecasting the size of the population in the years ahead. The level of births and deaths follows a more predictable trend – but the balance of immigration and emigration is much harder to forecast. It has swung hugely in recent years, from positive in the Celtic Tiger years, to negative after the financial crash, to strongly positive again, with a distortion, of course, during the Covid years.
Under three assumptions the CSO uses in its population and labour force projections, net migration – the number coming here minus the number leaving – is assumed to be about 45,000 in the next year or two, and then either remaining at that level or falling gradually but possibly significantly in subsequent years. By comparison, net migration peaked at 79,300 in the year to April 2024 and fell to below 60,000 the subsequent year. So more people are expected to continue to come to work here than will leave in the years ahead, though the net figure will ease from the peaks seen in the post-Covid boom. That is the longer-term forecast, but what swings we will see into the years ahead remains to be seen. If jobs growth remains, then the net figure will indeed remain positive. But as the latest figures show, the jobs market is unpredictable.
