This publication is categorised as a CSO Frontier Series Output. Particular care must be taken when interpreting the statistics in this release as it may use new methods which are under development and/or data sources which may be incomplete, for example new administrative data sources.
The Monthly Estimates of Payroll Employees using Administrative Data calculates the estimated number of employees, both indexed and absolute values using Revenue’s PAYE Modernisation as the data source. The series provides estimates of the number of employees by Age, Sex and NACE sector. The sectors of economic activity included were determined in accordance with the NACE Rev. 2 classification scheme, which is the European Commission’s classification system for economic activity. Persons are counted if they are estimated to have worked for greater than zero pay during the reference month. This differs to the criteria used to derive International Labour Organisation (ILO) and Principal Economic Status (PES) employment; therefore, results do not align with the Labour Force Survey (LFS) due to differing methodology. Some coherence comparisons with the LFS are included at the end of the background notes. Data are presented in both seasonally and non-seasonally adjusted form.
PAYE Modernisation (PMOD) has been operational for all employers in the State since the beginning of 2019. Under this system, employers are required to report their employee’s pay and deductions in real-time to Revenue each time they operate payroll. Information is provided to Revenue at individual payslip level and pseudonymised data are used by the CSO.
The Monthly Estimates of Payroll Employees using Administrative Data is published as a release, therefore the methodology and data are subject to revision. As more data become available, due to later transmissions from employers, the series may change from month to month. As this particularly affects the most recent months, figures should be considered provisional for the two most recent months for the non-seasonally adjusted data. These data are available on Px-Stat (CSO main data dissemination service). An annual process will be carried out once per year which may lead to revisions for published data. Seasonally adjusted data in this release are subject to revision based on updates to the seasonally adjusted series whenever new monthly data are added.
Calendarisation is the process of converting PMOD payments into a format that can produce monthly employment counts, based on the estimated period of employment. This ensures employee counts are measured in the period in which work is done. All payments are assumed to be in lieu; hence the work was completed in the preceding days/weeks of the date the payment is recorded on PMOD.
To estimate the period of work, the pay frequency is used to assign an estimated start date of work for each payment of an employment. The list of days used is as follows:
| Table A: Proportion of Payment Frequencies | ||
| Days subtracted from Pay Date | Pay Frequency | Proportion of payment frequencies for 2021 at payment level |
| 6 | Weekly | 0.59667 |
| 13 | Fortnightly | 0.19176 |
| 14 | Other | 0.00014 |
| 14 | Twice Monthly | 0.00267 |
| 27 | Four-Weekly | 0.00738 |
| 28 | Week-Based-Monthly | 0.00001 |
| 30 | Monthly | 0.20109 |
| 90 | Quarterly | 0.00023 |
| 182 | Bi-Annual | 0.00001 |
| 364 | Annual | 0.00003 |
For the resulting tables, an employed person is counted once per month. Persons are included if they receive a payment within the reference month or if their work is estimated to have taken place within the month.
The Employment Index statistics are compiled using 2019=100 as the base year. This is the average value of the totals for each month of the year.
The analysis undertaken in this release excludes the following records from the administrative data sources used. Any records:
Some specific tables are as follows:
NACE sectors are assigned to each employment using the Legal Unit.
On the CSO Business Register, there are two main options based on NACE: Primary NACE, and Secondary NACE. Operationally, the NACE is assigned at birth based on Revenue files. Primary and secondary NACEs are assigned based on the distinction made at the Local Unit and these feed into each Legal Unit and the Enterprise. In cases where there may be multiple Legal Units making up an enterprise, the primary and secondary NACEs may not reflect the true nature of each individual Legal Unit, as it reflects the overall Enterprise. To account for this there is an additional NACE at the Legal Unit level, called the Legal NACE, which can be assigned to its own individual NACE separate to the primary or secondary, if NACE is associated with one of the pre-existing Local Units within the structure. Where these are not available, the primary NACE using the CSO Business Register is applied.
If a person has multiple jobs, these are ranked according to estimated pay and the higher paid employment in the reference month is kept for NACE allocation to persons. Estimated pay is calculated by creating a daily pay amount for each payment using pay frequency. The daily pay rates are averaged across the month using all payments for a person in a job.
The sectors of economic activity included in the survey were determined in accordance with the NACE Rev. 2 classification scheme, which is the European Commission’s classification system for economic activity. The NACE Rev. 2 sectors included were as follows:
| Sector | Description |
| Sector A | Agriculture, forestry, and fishing |
| Sector B | Mining and quarrying |
| Sector C | Manufacturing |
| Sector D | Electricity, gas, steam, and air conditioning supply |
| Sector E | Water supply; sewerage, waste management and remediation activities |
| Sector F | Construction |
| Sector G | Wholesale and retail trade; Repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles |
| Sector H | Transportation and storage |
| Sector I | Accommodation and food service activities |
| Sector J | Information and communication |
| Sector K | Financial and insurance activities |
| Sector L | Real estate activities |
| Sector M | Professional, scientific, and technical activities |
| Sector N | Administrative and support service activities |
| Sector R | Arts, entertainment, and recreation |
| Sector S | Other service activities |
| Sector T | Activities of households as employers; undifferentiated goods - and services - producing activities of households for own use |
| Sector U | Activities of extraterritorial organisations and bodies |
For this release, Tourism Industries is derived from a list of NACE Rev. 2 activities developed by Eurostat. This list comprises of:
| Code | Description |
| H4910 | Passenger rail transport, interurban |
| H4932 | Taxi operation |
| H4939 | Other passenger land transport n.e.c. |
| H5010 | Sea and coastal passenger water transport |
| H5030 | Inland passenger water transport |
| H5110 | Passenger air transport |
| I5510 | Hotels and similar accommodation |
| I5520 | Holiday and other short-stay accommodation |
| I5530 | Camping grounds, recreational vehicle parks and trailer parks |
| I5610 | Restaurants and mobile food service activities |
| I5630 | Beverage serving activities |
| N771 | Rental and leasing of motor vehicles |
| N7721 | Rental and leasing of recreational and sports goods |
| N791 | Travel agency and tour operator activities |
| N7990 | Other reservation service and related activities |
For this release, Cultural and Creative Industries is derived from a list of NACE Rev. 2 activities developed by Eurostat. This list comprises of:
| Code | Description |
| C18 | Printing and reproduction of recorded media |
| C3212 | Manufacture of jewellery and related articles |
| C322 | Manufacture of musical instruments |
| G4761 | Retail sale of books in specialised stores |
| G4762 | Retail sale of newspapers and stationery in specialised stores |
| J5811 | Book publishing |
| J5813 | Publishing of newspapers |
| J5814 | Publishing of journals and periodicals |
| J5821 | Publishing of computer games |
| J59 | Motion picture, video and television programme production, sound recording and music publishing activities |
| J60 | Programming and broadcasting activities |
| J6391 | News agency activities |
| M7111 | Architectural activities |
| M741 | Specialised design activities |
| M742 | Photographic activities |
| M743 | Translation and interpretation activities |
| N7722 | Renting of video tapes and disks |
| R90 | Creative, arts and entertainment activities |
| R91 | Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural activities |
The seasonal adjustment process used in the PMOD data series is based on the X-13 ARIMA framework as implemented in JDEMETRA+. In the case of these monthly employee estimates, seasonal adjustment is conducted using the direct approach, where each series is independently adjusted.
In general, diagnostics are of high quality. One caveat remains however - this is a very short time series (three years of monthly data) and is thus at the lower limit of acceptable length for the seasonal adjustment process.
As more data points become available, this caveat will eventually no longer be relevant. However, in the short term, it means that care should be taken in interpreting the seasonally adjusted output.
Users should be aware that there is increased uncertainty around the seasonally adjusted figures during the COVID-19 period.
In Employment: Employees who are estimated to have worked for greater than zero pay during the reference month.
The primary classification used for the LFS results is the ILO (International Labour Office) labour force classification. Labour Force Survey data on this basis have been published since 1988. The ILO classification distinguishes the following main subgroups of the population aged 15 or over:
In Employment: Persons who worked in the week before the survey for one hour or more for payment or profit, including work on the family farm or business and all persons who had a job but were not at work because of illness, holidays etc. in the week.
Usual Residence: Usual residence means the place where a person normally spends the daily period of rest, regardless of temporary absences for purposes of recreation, holidays, visits to friends and relatives, business, medical treatment, or religious pilgrimage. The following persons alone are usual residents of a specific geographical area:
| Comparisons | Labour Force Survey | PAYE Modernisation |
| Input type | Subjective input from person interviewed (survey) | Objective counts of payments on real time system (administrative data source) |
|---|---|---|
| Definition | Persons worked for 1 hour for profit or pay in reference week | Person estimated to have worked during the reference month and received greater than zero pay for work done |
| Frequency | Quarterly (based on 1 reference week in the quarter) | Monthly |
| Self-employed persons with second job as employee | Self-employed may have secondary employee-based job not counted in the LFS employee series |
All employees counted |
| Inclusion criteria |
Resident in State (those who have lived in their place of usual residence for a continuous period of at least 12 months before the reference time or those who arrived in their place of usual residence during the 12 months before the reference time with the intention of staying there for at least one year) |
Tax liable in State |
| Exclusion criteria |
Employees not working for pay or profit during reference period |
PRSI classes M, S and missing |
The following results were compiled on 13 July 2022.
An analysis of the contributions to the gap between the Labour Force Survey and Administrative data was carried out to determine the primary reasons for the gap between the series. The PAYE Modernisation payments were filtered by each LFS week in the quarter and persons were counted by each week they were estimated to have worked. If there were 13 LFS weeks each person was assigned a weight of 1/13 and for the quarters with 14 weeks the weights were 1/14 per person per week. These weighted estimates were summed across each quarter to get a quarterly estimate of payroll employees. This analysis showed an average difference (absolute value) between the two series of 3.1%.
If the number of self-employed persons with a secondary job as employees are added to the LFS figures the gap between series drops to an average of 2.9% using the quarterly method outlined above.
The average difference between the two series is 6.0% taken from beginning to end, while the average difference from January 2019 to March 2020 (pre-COVID-19 impacts) was 8.2%.
The LFS employee series excludes employees whose primary employment is self-employment, while the Monthly Estimates of Payroll Employees using Administrative Data counts these individuals.
The largest difference between LFS employee series and the PMOD series was 210,400 in June 2019 while the minimum difference was 9,300 in February 2021, where the PMOD series was lower than the LFS series for the first time.
A potential cause of the narrowing of the difference was the ILO status of survey respondents during the COVID-19 crisis. Some persons, like those in receipt of the Pandemic Unemployment Payment and/or persons away from work but expecting to return to work within the following three months, would be classified as employed under ILO criteria but are not captured in the PMOD series as they were not estimated to be working for pay during the reference month.
When lockdowns were implemented the difference between series decreases; April 2020, October/November 2020, and January/February 2021. Some other months, July 2021 for example, also experience a decrease in the difference.
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