The true scale of Lebanon's labor collapse

Lebanon has long been no stranger to economic turbulence, but the scale of labor market deterioration since 2019 is staggering. Behind the headline unemployment figure lies a complex picture, shaped by compounding crises, a hollowing-out workforce, stark gender inequalities, and a generation of young people with nowhere to go.

The unemployment rate is only the beginning

When the Central Administration of Statistics (CAS), in partnership with the International Labour Organization (ILO), released Lebanon's national labor force survey in January 2022, the results were alarming. Lebanon's unemployment rate had nearly tripled, from 11.4% in 2018-19 to 29.6% in January 2022, meaning roughly one in three active workers could not find a job.

But even that figure understates the problem. The ILO's broader labor underutilization indicator, known as LU4, captures not just the unemployed but also those working fewer hours than they need and those who have given up looking for work entirely. In Lebanon, LU4 reached 50.1% in 2022, up from just 16.2% before the crisis. In practical terms, one in two people within the labor force was not being put to productive use. That is not an unemployment crisis. That is a labor market in collapse.

Compounding this, Lebanon's labor force participation rate, the share of working-age people either employed or actively seeking work, stood at just 43.4% as of 2023, well below regional peers. A significant portion of the population has simply withdrawn from the labor market altogether, no longer captured even in the already-troubling unemployment figures.

Lebanon's last comprehensive national labor force survey was conducted in January 2022 by the CAS and ILO. A new full survey has not been published since. The ILO reaffirmed as recently as April 2025 that it is collaborating with the CAS on a new Labour Force Survey, but results have not been released yet.

The crisis behind the crisis

The roots of this collapse stretch back to October 2019, when Lebanon's financial system began its dramatic unraveling. The economic crisis wiped out 95% of the Lebanese pound's value, sent poverty soaring, and dismantled the purchasing power of wages practically overnight. Since the start of the crisis, an estimated 20% of workers lost their jobs outright, and 61% of firms reduced their workforce.

Informality, already a structural feature of the Lebanese economy, deepened further. In 2019, around 55% of employment was informal. By 2022, that figure had risen to 63%. As of late 2024, 65% of employees were working without social protection, no contracts, no benefits, no safety net. Most workers were paid in a Lebanese pound worth a fraction of what it had been; the ILO found that only 3% of the working population were being paid in "fresh dollars" or hard currency.

Then came yet another blow. The 2023-2024 conflict, which intensified sharply from September 2024 before a ceasefire took effect in November, dealt a fresh round of damage to an already fragile labor market. An ILO rapid assessment based on surveys of over 2,200 workers and 700 businesses found that nearly 25% of workers had been out of employment during the conflict. Even after the ceasefire, around 14% of surveyed workers reported having lost their jobs. Average monthly income had fallen by more than 15%, while working hours and days also declined.

Women and youth: A system that excludes them

If Lebanon's overall labor data is troubling, the numbers for women and young people are especially stark.

Female labor force participation stood at just 22.2% in 2022, compared to 66.2% for men, a gap of nearly 40 percentage points. Women's unemployment reached 32.7%, and their underutilization rate climbed to 57.1%, nearly triple the pre-crisis level. These figures place Lebanon among the most gender-unequal labor markets in the Arab region, which the ILO's Global Employment Trends for Youth 2024 identifies as having the largest gender gap in employment-to-population ratios of any world region, with young women nearly completely excluded from the youth labor force.

Among youth aged 15–24, the picture is even grimmer. Nearly half are unemployed, and the LU4 underutilization rate reaches 64.2%, meaning nearly two in three young Lebanese are either out of work, underemployed, or have stopped looking. Paradoxically, university-educated youth face some of the harshest outcomes: those with a degree had an unemployment rate of 36%, in part because the formal jobs that would match their qualifications simply do not exist in sufficient numbers.

The brain drain accelerant

This combination of factors has accelerated emigration to a degree Lebanon has not seen in a generation. Between 2019 and 2022 alone, an estimated 875,000 people left the country, compared to 600,000 who emigrated across the entire period from 1992 to 2018. According to the Crisis Observatory at the American University of Beirut, 77% of youth residing in Lebanon reported wanting to leave as of 2021.

The economic cost is self-reinforcing. As skilled professionals and educated young people exit, the domestic workforce becomes less skilled on average. That in turn discourages the investment and high-value economic activity needed to generate the very jobs that might have kept people home.

A path forward

The ILO's Arab States Employment and Social Outlook 2024 points to a set of interventions with proven track records in similar contexts: expanding access to affordable childcare to bring more women into the workforce, removing legal and structural barriers to formal employment, and creating youth transition programs that bridge the gap between education and the labor market.

Because the numbers, for all their grimness, are also a map. Nearly half the workforce is sitting idle. Women and young people are being systematically excluded from an economy that cannot afford to exclude anyone. And every skilled professional who boards a plane out of Beirut is carrying with them exactly the capacity Lebanon needs to reconstruct itself. Turning those numbers around is the foundation on which any durable recovery will have to be built.