Migrant workers in Australia held 26.3% of all jobs in Australia in 2019-20 (5.3 million jobs, worked by 3.6 million migrants). This was slightly below their 29.8% share of Australia’s population, according to data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Of the total number of jobs held by migrants, over half (56.6%) were held by permanent migrant workers while 29.5% were held by temporary migrant workers and 12.9% were held by New Zealand citizens.

Bjorn Jarvis, ABS Head of Labour Statistics, said, "The addition of migrant information (from the Multi-Agency Data Integration Project) into rich labour market datasets allows us to better understand labour market outcomes of migrants working in Australia. For the first time, this includes insights into both temporary and permanent migrants."

The data noted that the largest employing industries of migrants were administrative and support services (14.1% of jobs held by migrants); health care and social assistance (12.1%); and accommodation and food services (11.3%).

Further data from the Bureau for 2019-2020 showed that, overall, 17.9 million (89.3%) jobs across Australia were employees and 2.1 million (10.7%) jobs were owner managers.

Meanwhile, of all jobs, 15.3 million (76.4%) were private sector jobs and 3.2 million (15.8%) were public sector jobs. By age group, workers aged 25-29 years held the highest number of jobs (2.7 million).