Eurostat: In North Macedonia, 23.4% of young people neither work nor study – twice the European average

According to Eurostat’s 2026 Regional Yearbook, published on September 23, nearly one in four residents of North Macedonia aged 15–29 in 2025 was neither engaged in any working activity nor attending any educational or training program.

Specifically, the rate of so-called NEET young people (not in employment, education, or training) reached 23.4%, marking an increase from 22.6% recorded a year earlier, in 2024. This percentage is more than double the European Union average, which stood at 11% for the same year.

Compared with neighboring countries, the differences are striking: Serbia had a NEET rate of 15.1%, Bulgaria 13.8%, and Greece 13.6% in 2025. Meanwhile, the EU target aims to reduce this indicator to 9% by 2030, a threshold that North Macedonia is still far from.

The NEET indicator is used by Eurostat as a more comprehensive instrument than classic unemployment, as it also captures those young people who are completely inactive in the labor market and are not attending school, university, or other forms of qualification at the same time.

This year’s yearbook includes North Macedonia together with other candidate countries and provides an expanded panorama of inequalities in population, labor market, health, living conditions, economy, transport, and agriculture. The particular focus topics of this edition are young people in the labor market, housing, cardiovascular diseases, and the agricultural sector.

A methodological aspect that stands out concerns statistical divisions. Although North Macedonia is divided into eight NUTS 3 regions – Vardar, East, Southwest, Southeast, Pelagonia, Polog, Northeast, and Skopje – at the European NUTS 2 level, used for many employment, housing, and health indicators, the country is treated as a single unit. Consequently, the new atlas does not allow readers to make direct comparisons between regions, for example between Skopje and Pelagonia, for each theme. For some economic and demographic indicators there are more detailed regional series, but for others the information exists only at the national level. This means that not every European map shows North Macedonia fragmented into its eight constituent parts.

This issue becomes particularly sensitive in the field of housing. Eurostat places importance on the so-called housing cost overburden rate, which considers a household to be overburdened if it spends more than 40% of its disposable income on housing-related expenses – including rent or mortgage installments, electricity, water, heating, maintenance, and other regular costs. For the EU, the 2025 average was 7.7%, but it should be noted that reference years for candidate countries do not always coincide; therefore, comparisons with North Macedonia require specifying the period to which the data refer, rather than simply trusting the map’s colors.

The same logic applies to the health sector. An entire chapter is dedicated to diseases of the cardiovascular system, including heart ischemia, heart attacks, strokes, and other vascular disorders. In the EU, these pathologies were responsible for almost one-third of all deaths in 2023, with wide regional differences and particularly high rates in parts of Eastern Europe. For North Macedonia as well, Eurostat has health data, but for some indicators they are again presented at the national level, without being broken down into the eight planning regions.

It is precisely here that the publication raises an internal question: to what extent is North Macedonia able to measure its own regional inequalities? In order for policies for balanced regional development to respond to the emigration of young people, the lack of jobs, access to health care, or housing conditions, statistics must reflect not only the country’s ranking in a European context but also the concrete differences between Skopje, the Eastern Region, Polog, Pelagonia, and other territories.

The Regional Yearbook contains 13 thematic fields. The statistical material for the publication was mainly downloaded in March and April 2026, and the reference year varies depending on the indicator. As a result, the maps do not form a static picture of a single moment; the labor market is illuminated with data from 2025, some health indicators with those from 2023, while for other statistics the latest possible information may belong to an earlier period.

Nevertheless, one figure in this new edition remains impossible to ignore: in 2025, 23.4% of young people in North Macedonia were simultaneously outside the labor market and outside the educational or training system, compared to a European average of only 11%.