Having myself migrated from Spain to Germany to work, I wanted to check if I was the typical “EU mover”. Not at all, apparently.

Imagine a young Romanian guy, let's call him Mihai, let's say he's 25 years old. After finishing his vocational training and trying out a couple of jobs, his employment prospects in Romania don't look very promising, so he starts looking for opportunities abroad.

Some friends and acquaintances have already relocated to Germany and convincehim that this could be a good opportunity for him. A few weeks later, he moves to Bavaria and startswork in a construction company, where the pay is significantly higher than in Romania. This profile is fictional, but could well be real.

In 2024, there were over 10 million working-age EU nationals living and working in an EU member state other than their own, according to a European Commission (EC) report on labour mobility.

One in four of these “EU movers” came from Romania, by far the largest labour force “exporter” within the bloc, followed by Poland (11%) and Italy (10%). This trend has been consistent in recent years. The majority head to Germany, which is still the most popular destination, with over 3 million workers relocating there in 2024.

Just as in our fictional profile, EU internal migrants are predominantly young and male: over half of them are between 20 and 34 years old. Equipped with medium-level education, they usually work in construction, accommodation, food services, as well as transportation, according to the EC report.

Unsurprisingly, economic factors are crucial to these trends. “For the more highly educated, there have always been more opportunities in their home country, while for the technical-skilled workers, the pay difference [within the EU] was very big”, Wouter Zwysen, senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), told The European Correspondent. “People also tend to move to where people they know have moved, although the trend is flipping a bit in more recent times, because incomes are converging and the pay differences are becoming much smaller.”

Still, the 10 million EU movers represent only a fraction of the total working-age European population of 262 million. This figure pales in comparison to other economically equivalent areas, such as the US, Zwysen said. There are a few reasons as to why this is.

There are cultural and language barriers, but also bureaucratic hurdles “related to social security [systems]”, which are still a national issue, as well as the “particularly vocational and technical” recognition of qualifications. This makes internal EU mobility not all that different to international migration, according to Zwysen.

These workers, especially those moving for economic reasons, “still face disadvantages on the labour market, meaning they often work on lower-quality jobs or for lower wages than locals,” Zwysen said. This is especially true for those coming from central, eastern, and Baltic EU member states, according to an ETUI analysis co-authored by Zwysen.

Level of education is a powerful employment status predictor for these internal migrants, the EC report found. Surprisingly, EU movers with lower schooling levels are more likely to be working than natives. In Norway, for instance, the difference is almost 20 percentage points (80% employment rate for movers vs. 62% for locals). Although the report offers no clue as to why, a possible explanation, according to Zwysen, could be that movers are more willing to accept lower status employment than locals. The trend is reversed for working-age movers with a university degree, who have slightly lower employment rates than locals.

There are substantial differences in employment, depending on where the EU movers come from, according to ETUI's report. Migrants from western European and Nordic countries struggle more to find work, but when they do, they tend to be employed in higher-status jobs than locals.

Those from central, eastern, or Baltic countries find jobs relatively easily, but are more likely to work in “lower status” occupations. This difference may be due to the reasons people migrate: the former come mainly looking for work, while the latter likely have “different motivations (potentially non-economic, e.g. family reasons)”, according to the ETUI report.