John Clendennen (Offaly, Fine Gael)
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970. To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment the number of employees employed in sectors that would benefit from a reduction in VAT to 9%, by county, in tabular form; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [44077/25]

Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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I understand that the Deputy is referring to the rate of VAT applicable to the hospitality sector, which is currently applied at 13.5%, and is requesting information with regards to the effect of reducing the applicable VAT rate to 9%. Officials in my Department do not have access to the specific data requested, but I and my officials have endeavoured to provide a response based on the information at hand.

The CSO’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) collects data on the number of employees under the NACE code economic sector classification for accommodation and food service activities. However, this NACE code category would not directly correspond to employees employed by businesses that would benefit from a proposed reduction in VAT from 13.5% to 9%. Additionally, this data is only available at regional rather than county level.

The following table shows the number of employees in the Accommodation and Food Service Activities sector as of 2025 Q1, according to the CSO LFS.

Furthermore, the Office of the Revenue Commissioners did publish a paper in June 2018 entitled The 9% VAT Rate: Tax Receipts and Employment. This analysis was noted to have been undertaken at the time at the request of the Department for Finance. For the purposes of this research, Revenue linked data from employers returns to VAT records to analyse employment trends in those sectors for which the 9% rate applied at the time, including hospitality. This information is publicly available on Revenue’s website; however, no publicly available update to this data has been published since 2018. This data does not provide a county breakdown. My Department would not have detailed access to this data to replicate the analysis for later years.

It is important to note that Revenue’s data would record employments rather than individuals (e.g. a person working two jobs or switching jobs during the year would be recorded as two separate employments) and therefore would not directly equate to the CSO data.

The Programme for Government (PfG) 2025: Securing Ireland’s Future sets the following commitment in relation to VAT: “The Government will bring forward measures to support SMEs, in particular the retail and hospitality sectors, acknowledging the increased cost pressures on these sectors and this will entail changes to VAT, PRSI and other measures. These measures will be implemented as part of the normal budget process.”

My officials and I regularly engage with other Government Departments and Ministerial colleagues on matters of Budgetary policy, including with the Minister for Finance and his officials. Ultimately, any changes to the VAT rate are a decision for the Minister for Finance as part of the annual Budgetary process.