Payrolls data still point to heathy pace of Irish job creation

This morning’s CSO data, showing another 0.5% gain in employee numbers in the first four months of 2026, to 2.6 million in April, are a reassuring sign that a healthy pace of job creation has been sustained this year. Construction (+4.5%), health (+4%), public administration (+3.4%) and professional/scientific (+2.8%) were among the fastest-growing sectors, while information technology (-0.4%) and industry (-0.6%) saw small year-on-year declines in employment.

The outturn gives us confidence in our view that the much more pernicious slowdown in Irish job creation, signalled by the official Labour Force Survey (LFS) measure (down 0.6% in Q1 and flat year-on-year), reflects sampling error and volatility in the data. Buoyant income tax returns, up 7.5% in 2026, also paint a very different picture to the LFS. Therefore, we are likely to keep our forecast for employment growth in 2026 above 1%, assuming a bounce-back in the LFS measure in Q2 2026.

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Bank of Ireland Economics Weekly June 26th 2026