ANNEX IISupplementary provisions
ANNEX II DEFINITION OF THE REFERENCE QUARTERS (a) Quarters of each year refer to the 12 months of the year, so that January, February and March belong to the first quarter, April, May and June to the second quarter, July, August and September to the third quarter and October, November and December to the fourth quarter. (b) The reference weeks are allocated to the reference quarters so that a week belongs to the quarter as defined in (a) to which at least four days of that week belong, unless this results in the first quarter of the year consisting of only 12 weeks. When that occurs, the quarters of the year in question will be formed by consecutive blocks of 13 weeks. (c) When, according to (b), a quarter consists of 14 weeks instead of 13 weeks the Member States should attempt to spread the sample over all of the 14 weeks. (d) If it is not feasible to spread the sample to cover all 14 weeks of the quarter, the Member State concerned may skip one week of that quarter (i.e. not cover it). The week to be skipped should be typical with regard to unemployment, employment and average actual hours worked and should be part of a month containing five Thursdays. (e) The first quarter of 2009 shall start on Monday, 29 December 2008. Until the end of 2011, Member States running the Labour Force Survey along with other surveys as one single integrated survey may define the start of reference quarters one week earlier than laid down in (a), (b) and (e).