A study of minimum wage employment in Ireland using online job vacancy data

In recent years, research opportunities in labour economics have expanded, due to the availability of large datasets capturing online job vacancies. While not a replacement for well-established labour market surveys, online job vacancy data have several advantages. They contain information that may be otherwise unavailable from traditional survey data; moreover, this information can be available in real time, thus removing any time lag in data availability that can be a feature of traditional labour market surveys. 

In this report, we use data from the near universe of online job vacancies in Ireland, for the period 2018 to 2024, to examine minimum wage employment across a number of dimensions. The data, which are made available by Lightcast, allow us to examine the county-level distribution of minimum wage vacancies between 2018 and 2024. In addition, we examine the types of jobs that minimum wage employees are typically recruited for, along with the required skills for these positions and how they vary across counties. We also fill an important gap in our knowledge of minimum wage employment in Ireland by profiling the top minimum wage employers in the country – information that has up to now been unavailable.