Methodology

The index ranks countries by how much statutory weight sits on an employer, using three measures drawn directly from law: the employer’s social-security contribution rate, the minimum statutory severance, and the minimum statutory notice period. A higher composite score means a heavier employer burden. Rank 1 is the heaviest.

It is a measure of statutory floors, not of total cost or of how any single provider prices a country. It exists to make one thing comparable across borders: what the law itself requires of an employer.

Each pillar is normalised with percent-rank: a country’s raw value is scored against the distribution of all included countries, producing a 0 to 100 score where 100 is the highest (heaviest) value in the set. This makes the three pillars, measured in different units (a percentage, weeks of pay, and weeks of notice), directly comparable.

Countries are then ordered by composite score, descending. The country with the highest composite is ranked 1.

A country is scored only if it has an approved, sourced value for all three pillars. If any one of the employer contribution rate, statutory severance, or statutory notice is missing, the country is excluded and listed by name, along with which fields it is missing. We do not estimate, interpolate, or use AI to fill gaps. This edition scores 192 countries.

A country is scored only if it has approved, non-null values for all three pillar fields (employer_ssc_rate, severance_weeks, notice_weeks). No gap-filling. Countries missing any field are recorded as excluded.

Every value comes from the same sourced-and-dated statutory dataset that powers our country pages. The overwhelming majority of scored values come from institutional statutory sources: ISSA country profiles, the World Bank Employing Workers dataset, ILO EPLEX, and the OECD. A small tail, 0 of 576 scored values, comes from editorially reviewed secondary research. Every row in the downloadable dataset is labeled with its source and as-of date, so any number in the index can be traced back to where it came from.

When more than one source carries the same figure, a fixed source-priority order decides which one is used. National statutory figures take precedence over harmonised aggregators.

The index is published in annual editions (2026 is the current one). Because pillar scores are percent-ranks within an edition’s set of included countries, scores are comparable within an edition but not across editions: if the set of included countries changes, the same raw value can produce a different rank. Compare positions within one edition, not a single country’s score between editions.