OECD Employment Protection

This ranking sorts 72 countries by oecd employment protection, drawn directly from OECD with a native scale of 0-6. OECD composite employment protection legislation index covering regular, temporary, and collective dismissal. Data on this page reflects the 2025 release cycle, and OECD EPL is a multi-year panel maintained from 1990 onward. All rankings use unique ranks, alphabetical tie-breaking means every country has a distinct position, even when raw values match to two decimals.

The average across all 72 ranked countries is 2.27, with a median of 2.33. The median is the middle-ranked country's own value, so a handful of unusually high or low countries can't pull it the way they pull an average; here the two sit close together, meaning the tracked countries cluster fairly evenly around the middle. At the top of the table sit Indonesia (4.08), Venezuela (3.50), and Kazakhstan (3.32). At the bottom, Costa Rica reports 0.85, below Uruguay (0.98) and Nicaragua (1.24). The spread between highest and lowest is 3.23, indicating how much statutory or practical variation exists within the tracked countries.

Ranking order does not imply a value judgment, higher scores on OECD Employment Protection mean stricter statutory protection, which different stakeholders read differently. For workers, higher values typically signal stronger formal safeguards against dismissal; for employers, they signal higher adjustment costs and longer dismissal processes. Click any country row to open its full profile, where the same indicator is displayed alongside related metrics, notice periods, severance schedules, B-READY pillar breakdowns, or OECD historical trends, so that the rank you see here can be traced back to concrete statutory rules and World Bank survey measurements. All underlying values are stored on PlainEmploy exactly as published by OECD, with no transformation beyond the rank calculation.

A ranking like this one is most useful for spotting groups of countries that behave similarly, not for reading too much into a single position. The countries near the top share strong statutory protections against dismissal, the middle band tends to balance worker security against employer flexibility, and the lower positions usually reflect labor markets that lean toward easier hiring and firing. Small gaps between adjacent ranks rarely matter, because the underlying indicators are built from survey responses and legal coding that carry their own margin of error. Pay more attention to which tier a country falls into than to whether it sits one or two places higher than a neighbor. Coverage also shapes the order, since a country only appears here if it reports the relevant measure, so the list reflects the countries that publish data rather than every labor market in the world. Where you want the full statutory and practical context behind a position, open the individual country page, which lays out each source, the year it was published, and the caveats that apply to that figure.