Labour force participation

People who work or look for work, as a share of everyone aged 15 and over.

The labour force participation rate is the share of people aged 15 and over who are in the labour force: employed, or without work but looking for it. Students, pensioners, people who care for family at home and those who have given up looking are outside it. It falls where populations age and where the young study longer, and rises where women enter paid work. The International Labour Organization (ILO) models it from labour force surveys, and the World Bank republishes it.

World map · Labour force, % of people aged 15 and over

Year

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 2026-10-08) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

Over time · Labour force, % of people aged 15 and over

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 2026-10-08) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

Years

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All countries · Labour force, % of people aged 15 and over

Continent Year

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 2026-10-08) · fetched 30 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.

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