The Eurozone’s unemployment rate in November 2025 unexpectedly declined for the first time in seven months, showing the labour market’s resilience despite last year’s uncertain economic environment.

Unemployment in November crept down to 6.3% from 6.4% in the previous month of October, where it had been since May, according to the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat. This comes as jobless numbers in the bloc fell by 71,000 in November compared to October, though they had increased by around 416,000 since November of 2024.

Despite the lacklustre growth in recent economic activity, the labour market has remained quite tight, Capital Economics chief Europe economist, Andrew Kenningham, said in a note to clients after the jobless data. The unemployment rate isn’t expected to change much over the course of 2026, Kenningham argued.

The data tallies with a mildly improved outlook of private-sector employment from S&P Global’s purchasing manufacturers’ eurozone survey, published earlier this week. It showed employment continued to increase in December, with job creation accelerating, though only marginally, due to further cutbacks in the manufacturing sector.

Weakening German labour market 

There have also been signs of a weakening labour market in Europe’s largest economy, at least in the short term. Jobless numbers edged up in Germany in December, official data published earlier this week said, though the unemployment rate itself held steady. However, house prices and rents went up in Q3 2025. In the third quarter of 2025, house prices in the European Union (EU) went up by 5.5%, while rents increased by 3.1%, compared with the third quarter of 2024, according to Eurostat.

Compared with the second quarter of 2025, house prices increased by 1.6% and rents by 0.9%. House prices and rents in the EU followed a similar behaviour between 2010 and the second quarter of 2011, but have since evolved differently. While rents have increased steadily, house prices have followed a more variable pattern, combining periods of decline, stagnation and rapid increases. 

During the last decade, between 2015 and the third quarter of 2025, house prices in the EU increased by 63.6% and rents by 21.1%. As regards national data, when comparing the third quarter of 2025 with 2015, house prices increased more than rents in 25 of the EU countries for which data are available. Over this period, house prices more than tripled in Hungary (+275%) and have more than doubled in 11 countries, with the largest increases seen in Portugal (+169%), Lithuania (+162%) and Bulgaria (+156%). 

Finland was the only country where house prices decreased during this period (-2%). During the same period, rents increased in all the 27 EU countries, with the highest rise registered in Hungary (+107%), followed by Lithuania (+85%), Slovenia (+76%), Poland (+75%) and Ireland (+74%).