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Labour market information (LMI) provides an essential basis for employment and labour policies, and informs the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies that are better focused and targeted. LMI also contributes to a reduction in the transaction costs of labour markets as it helps overcome incomplete information of labour market agents.

LMI is variously defined as:

• Data about the workplace, including employment rates and salary information;
• Any information about the structure and working of a labour market and any factors likely to influence the structure and working of that market, including jobs available, people available to do those jobs, the mechanisms that match the two, changes in the external and internal business environements; and
• essentially data, statistics and research about the workplace including things like unemployment rates, salary, demand for, and supply of, labour.

In the context of LMI for Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG), a distinction has been made between labour market information and labour market intelligence, where labour market information refers to raw quantitative or qualitative data found in original sources such as tables, spreadsheets, graphs and charts, with labour market intelligence relating to an interpretation of raw data, referring to subsets of information that has been subjected to further analysis.

See also Labour market information systems