Between 2024 and 2025, 93.8% of employed people remained in work, 2.0% became unemployed and 4.3% became inactive. Employed people who remain in work do not all stay in the same job: about 370,000 of them changed jobs, or 7.9% of those who worked at both moments.

Furthermore, 42.4% of the unemployed remained unemployed, 30.9% found a job and 26.8% became inactive (i.e. not available for work and/or not actively looking for work). Among inactive people, 82.4% remained inactive, 12.6% found work and 5.0% became unemployed. This is what emerges from the latest figures of Statbel, the Belgian statistical office, on individual changes in the labour market status in 2025 compared to a year earlier.

This press release focuses on transitions on the labour market between 2024 and 2025 in a population of working age (15-64 years). The longitudinal nature of the Labour Force Survey makes it possible to measure the dynamics on the labour market. For example, is someone who is employed at a given time still employed a year later, or has this person become unemployed or inactive?

Working and changing jobs

The transition rate of employed people remains more or less the same as the year before. Among the nearly 5 million employed people aged 15-64 in 2024, about 4.7 million remained in work in 2025, 97,000 became unemployed and 213,000 became inactive on the labour market.

Employed people who remain in work do not all stay in the same job: about 370,000 of them changed jobs. This is 7.9% of those who were employed at both moments. This change of job can either be in the same or in another enterprise, or by starting a business. This percentage is comparable to the previous years, but remains higher than the pre-Covid level of 5 to 6%. Job mobility is higher among young people, men, in the Brussels-Capital Region, among people with at most a lower secondary education diploma and among part-time workers. Although the proportion of people changing jobs remains roughly stable, the proportion of those continuing to work in the same sector rises from 49.6% in 2024 to 53.9% in 2025, the highest figure since 2017, when records began. More than half of those who change jobs do so within the same sector. We see that in education and healthcare, people most often stay in the same sector: more than 60% of those who change jobs stay in the same sector. More than half of the changes in construction, financial activities and public administration are also within the same sector.

Unemployed

The most volatile group is unemployed people. However, we see that the percentage that remains unemployed is quite high (42.4%). This is also a large group in absolute figures: almost 130,000 jobseekers in 2024 are still looking for work in 2025 and are available to start working. 30.9% of them are in work a year later and 26.8% have become inactive.

Inactive

82.4% of the inactive (15-64 years) remained inactive in 2025. This figure was still 85.8% between 2023 and 2024. 12.6% of them are working and 5.0% became unemployed a year later. So of the 2.2 million inactive people in 2024, there are still 1.8 million inactive in 2025, including a large group of students who declared in the survey that they do not work. We are therefore seeing a higher proportion of inactive people who are looking for work or taking up employment. We observe a decline in the proportion of economically inactive people who remain inactive among men and women, people of Belgian nationality, across all regions (although the decline is slightly smaller in the Walloon Region (-1.6 percentage points)) and across all age groups (with the exception of those aged 25-34). The decline is also particularly marked among highly-skilled people (-15.2 percentage points).