Methodology

The index ranks countries and territories 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. Where we say “countries” for short, the set includes a small number of territories and special administrative regions (for example Puerto Rico, Guernsey, and Hong Kong) that set their own employment rules.

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.

The employer-cost pillar counts every legally compulsory employer contribution on employment, including compulsory contributions to private funds — Australian superannuation, New Zealand’s KiwiSaver and ACC levy, Colombian pension funds — that some tax statistics (such as the OECD’s Taxing Wages) classify separately as “non-tax compulsory payments” and exclude. If an employer must pay it by law, it counts. The one documented exception is Switzerland’s mandatory BVG occupational pension: its employer share is age-banded on a coordinated salary, so no single statutory percentage of gross pay exists, and rather than estimate one we score Switzerland on its uniform contributions only.

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. Ties share a rank: countries with an identical composite score receive the same rank, and the next distinct score takes the next rank number (dense ranking). Because of ties, the last rank number is smaller than the number of scored countries — the ranking is complete, not truncated.

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 and territories.

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.

On the World Bank data’s age: most severance and notice values come from the World Bank Employing Workers dataset, whose final vintage is May 2019 — the Doing Business programme that produced it was discontinued in September 2021, and the data is preserved as a static archive. We use it because it remains the broadest severance and notice dataset collected under a single comparable methodology. Where we have verified that a law has changed since 2019 (for example Egypt’s Labour Law 14/2025 and Indonesia’s Omnibus Law), the archive value is replaced with a value sourced from the current national statute or ILO EPLEX, and the replacement is visible in the per-value source labels.

Source dates refer to when the figure was published or the law enacted, not to validity: long-standing labour codes remain in force as amended. Bolivia’s severance and notice, for instance, are set by the General Labour Law of 1942, as amended — still the governing statute today.

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.

Corrections policy: when a sourcing error is found within an edition, we correct the underlying value, rebuild the edition, and note the correction in the affected value’s provenance — we do not leave known-wrong numbers standing until the next edition. The dataset’s generated_at timestamp reflects the most recent rebuild.