Microproduct data guideintermediate

ILOSTAT Labour Statistics

Comparable labour-force, employment, and wage indicators for building country labour-market dashboards from ILO SDMX.

Start the guide Open official source

At a glance

Difficulty
Intermediate — some data preparation helps
Size
Small · ≤0.5 GB
Formats
JSON, CSV, SDMX
Access
API or Download
API key
Not required
Provider
International Labour Organization
Updates
Monthly
Data terms
ILO rights and permissions / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

ILOSTAT SDMX returns labour indicators such as unemployment rate by sex and age. Start with one country and one indicator. National definitions differ, modelled estimates are not survey microdata, and coverage gaps are common.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • An internet connection
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Open ILOSTAT and copy one dataflow identifier such as UNE_2EAP_SEX_AGE_RT.
  2. 2.Request SDMX-JSON for one country and a recent year range.
  3. 3.Cite ILOSTAT with the indicator code.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://sdmx.ilo.org/rest/data/ILO,DF_UNE_2EAP_SEX_AGE_RT/A.USA.SEX_T.AGE_YTHADULT_YGE15",
    headers={"Accept": "application/vnd.sdmx.data+json;version=1.0.0"},
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
observations = response.json()["data"]["dataSets"][0]["observations"]
unemployment = pd.DataFrame(
    [{"position": key, "value": value[0]} for key, value in observations.items()]
)
unemployment["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(unemployment.tail())
4

Test a useful signal

Track U.S. ILO unemployment

Test whether one ILOSTAT series can power a bounded labour-market chart.

  1. 01Confirm observation values returned for the selected series key.
  2. 02Plot the latest published rates and note missing years.
  3. 03Explain that ILO modelled series can differ from BLS household-survey rates and are not microdata.

Dataset details

International Labour Organization is an intergovernmental source. Last verified 2026-08-18. Temporal coverage: country-specific labour series published by ILOSTAT.

Theme

Markets & Economics

Domains

Labor EconomicsInternational StatisticsEmployment

Data types

Time SeriesTabular

Tasks

Country ComparisonLabor Market MonitoringTrend Analysis

Geography

Global

Formats

JSONCSVSDMX

Provider

International Labour Organization

Data terms

ILO rights and permissions / Creative Commons Attribution 4.0