Cyprus posted one of the stronger employment rates in the European Union in 2025, according to new Eurostat data, reaching 81.3 percent for people ages 20 to 64. That placed the country above the EU average of 76.1 percent, above the EU’s 2030 headline employment target of 78 percent, and above Cyprus’ own national 2030 target of 80 percent.
Across the bloc, the highest employment rates were recorded in Malta (83.6 percent), the Netherlands (83.4 percent), and Czechia (82.9 percent). Eurostat also said 2025 marked the highest EU employment rate since the start of the time series in 2009.
That makes the main point straightforward: Cyprus is performing strongly by EU standards. Still, the employment rate by itself does not show what kinds of jobs are driving that strength, who is filling them, or how evenly the gains are being shared.
The European Commission’s Autumn 2025 Economic Forecast for Cyprus said the labor market remained strong, with employment expanding by 1.6 percent year over year in the first half of 2025, unemployment falling to a record low of 4.3 percent, and employment growth supported by significant inflows of foreign workers.
Some of those workers remain largely invisible in the headline numbers. A Reuters report published in April 2025, citing the Council of Europe’s anti-trafficking body GRETA, said Cyprus employs more than 20,000 domestic workers, mainly from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Vietnam. Their work helps hold together parts of everyday life that rarely appear in labor-market summaries: cleaning homes, caring for children, and supporting the elderly.
The same report said many domestic workers were earning less than the wage floor that applies to other workers. It also pointed to earlier findings by the Cyprus Ombudsman’s office, cited by GRETA, showing that some workers had averaged 58 hours a week despite contracts set at 42 hours. Those figures were not presented as a new 2025 survey, but they still help show the kind of imbalance that can exist beneath strong labor-market statistics.
The unevenness shows up elsewhere, too. Eurostat data for 2025 showed that employment among men in Cyprus reached 86.4 percent, while employment among women reached 76.3 percent, leaving a 10.1 percentage-point gap. Eurostat reported an EU-wide gender employment gap of 9.6 points in 2025. So even with improvement in both categories, Cyprus still sat slightly above the EU average on that measure.
The honest reading is not that the strong employment figure was misleading. It is that it captured only part of the story. Cyprus’s labor market is performing well by EU standards. But the fuller picture includes the role of migrant labor, the hidden work inside homes and care settings, and the inequalities that remain beneath the headline.