Nearly 12 per cent of under 60s in Ireland were living in jobless households in the second quarter of 2020, according to the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
This compares to 9.6 per cent in the same period last year and reflects the impact of the coronavirus on the State’s labour market.
The headline figure would have been considerably higher but for the Government’s wage support schemes, which have preserved the employment status of hundreds of thousands of workers here.
The statistics on households and family units from the CSO's latest Labour Force Survey show the Mideast region had the lowest proportion of people aged 0-59 years living in jobless households (9.9 per cent), while the Border region had the highest proportion (17.7 per cent).
Breaking the results out by age there were increased shares of both adults and children living in jobless households in the second quarter compared to a year ago, the CSO said.
The share of adults (aged 18-59 years) living in jobless households was 11.1 per cent in second quarter compared with 8.8 per cent last year while the share of children (aged 0-17 years) living in jobless households was 13 per cent, compared with 11.3 per cent in the same period last year.
Composition
The figures also detailed the changing composition of Irish households over time. They show 27.8 per cent (538,200) of households in the State in the second quarter consisted of just one person and that was up from just over a fifth (22.3 per cent) on the same period in 2014.
There were 414,200 households consisting of a couple with no children which corresponded to just over a fifth (21.4 per cent) of all households and had not changed significantly on the figure recorded six years earlier.
There were 663,600 households containing couples with children and these accounted for 34.3 per cent of all households, down from 37.8 per cent in 2014. The share of lone parent households, meanwhile, increased from 11.3 per cent to 12.6 per cent over the six-year period.
The number of adult members classified as being employed was down by 1.5 per cent or 23,600 while those classified as unemployed fell by 16.7 per cent or 9,100 to 45,400.
The CSO's Jim Dalton said: "The Covid-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on the Irish Labour Market in 2020.
“That impact started towards the end of Q1 2020 and this is reflected in the impact on the labour market situation of members of the different family unit types in Q2 2020,” he said.
