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The paper measures and interprets the evolution of labour market protection in 21 high-income countries over three decades, using the concepts of “institutional diversity” and “trajectory of change” developed in the literature, and notably by G. Esping-Andersen. The level of protection is assessed through four institutional domains – employment protection, unemployment protection, income maintenance and active employment policy – and through changes in workforce composition. This measurement accounts for the joint evolution of labour market institutions, their complementarities and their relation with the social structure. The multi-dimensional nature of labour market protection is investigated using principal component analysis, while the characteristics of the countries’ trajectory of change are examined with a composite score. This contributes to the literature in three ways. First, a revised typology accounts for processes of change between 1990 and 2015, and clusters countries on the basis of coordination and solidarity levels. Second, despite a persistent gap, a large majority of coordinated market economies, which have experienced a decrease in the level of labour market protection, have moved closer to liberal market economies. Third, a fivefold taxonomy of countries’ trajectories of change (liberalisation, dualisation, flexibility, de-dualisation and higher protection), shows that these trajectories are not always path-dependent and consistent with institutional varieties previously developed in the scientific literature.