St. Maarten adopts international employment standard as 2026 Labour Force Survey launched

GREAT BAY--The Department of Statistics, STAT, has launched the 2026 Labour Force Survey, marking the first full Labour Force Survey in St. Maarten since 2018 and introducing a new international standard for measuring employment.

The 2026 survey applies the employment definition recommended by the International Labour Organization, ILO, adopted at the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians in 2013. Under this standard, a person is counted as employed if they worked at least one hour for pay or profit during the reference week, whether as an employee, in their own business, or as a contributing family worker. This replaces the four-hour rule used in St. Maarten’s 2018 Labour Force Survey.

STAT said the change is important because it aligns St. Maarten with the current international approach to labour statistics, making future results more internationally comparable. However, the Department also cautioned that the 2026 results will not be directly comparable with earlier years, since persons working one to three hours per week for pay will now be counted as employed, where previously they were not.

The Department is noting this change from the outset to ensure that the public, policymakers, employers, workers and researchers clearly understand the results once they are published. Any movement in the unemployment rate may reflect both actual developments in the labour market and the shift to the current international measurement standard.

Data collection for the 2026 Labour Force Survey runs from July to September 2026. The survey is a household sample survey and serves as the country’s main source for the official unemployment rate, labour-force participation rate and employment figures.

The Labour Force Survey is intended to be conducted every two years. It was last carried out in full in 2018, when the unemployment rate stood at 9.9 percent. The 2020 round was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Labour-market data were later drawn from the 2022 Population and Housing Census, which placed unemployment at 6.5 percent and recorded a labour force of 23,400 economically active persons.

Staffing and budgetary constraints prevented the survey from being conducted in 2023 and 2025. STAT said the Department now has the staff and budget in place, allowing the 2026 survey to re-establish the regular two-year cycle.

In addition to measuring employment and unemployment, the 2026 survey will collect information on demographics, education, employment status, job-search activity, availability for work, income and reasons for unemployment. It also includes a small number of questions on household spending, which will help update the weights behind the Consumer Price Index, St. Maarten’s official measure of inflation.

The survey will also include questions assessing how ready St. Maarten’s labour force is for artificial intelligence, AI, reflecting the growing impact of technology on employment, skills and future workforce planning.

Trained interviewers will visit a representative sample of households across the island’s districts. STAT said every interviewer will carry official identification. All information collected will be treated as strictly confidential, used only for statistical purposes, and reported only as totals and averages.

The Department emphasized that the accuracy of the results depends on the participation of selected households and thanked residents in advance for their cooperation.

The main results of the 2026 Labour Force Survey will be released once data collection and processing are complete. Results will be made available to the public at stats.sintmaartengov.org. For more information, persons may contact STAT at statinfo@sintmaartengov.org.

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