Students Corner

What is the Live Register?

The Live Register is used to provide a monthly series of the numbers of people (with some exceptions) registering for Unemployment Assistance/Benefit or for various other statutory entitlements at local offices of the Department of Social and Family Affairs.

Information is published in the form of a monthly release titled the Live Register (PDF 119KB). Data is also held on the CSO Data Dissemination Service and also published in the CSO's Statistical Yearbook.

It is specifically not designed to measure unemployment. However while the Live Register series is primarily an administrative count and not a specific measure of unemployment,
one of its main uses/purposes is as a short-term trend indicator of Unemployment. The series also offers users data at a detailed geographic level, i.e. down as far as county and even Local office level. This is not data they can get elsewhere and also explains why the series is so widely used.