Monthly

Data collection is by post and via the internet over a period that extends from the end of the month preceding the survey month to the survey publication date, i.e. 4 business days before the end of the current month.

Survey results are sent to the European Commission 4 business days before the end of the month.

The collection period runs from the end of the month preceding the reference month of the survey to the date of publication of the results (between the 20th and 25th of the reference month).

Legal unit

The survey covers 3,200 companies.

All companies with more than 100 employees are canvassed excepted hypermarkets (4711F). For the hypermarkets, the threshold of exhaustivity is 300 employees.

3,200 units

The  survey is conducted every month but not all questions are asked every month.

In practice, three models of questionnaires were created to take into account these specificities :
- the first questionnaire corresponds to the months of January and July.
- the second one is sent in February, April, June, August, October and December.
- the last one is sent in March, May, September and November.

The published series are seasonally adjusted (CVS). Seasonality tests are carried out on all series. A series that initially has no seasonal character is presented as a CVS series with zero coefficients and is equal to the gross series. The effects are estimated with the X13 and TramoSeats software under JDemetra+ (provided by Eurostat) at the level of aggregates specific to the NAF rev. 2 subclass survey. CVS indices for senior positions are obtained by aggregating the CVS indices that compose them.