Australia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in February increased by 0.1% year-on-year to 3.7%, according to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

On a monthly basis, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate fell by 0.4% from 4.1% in January.

The number of unemployed persons totalled 548,300, up 35,000 over the year (6.8%) and down 52,000 (-8.7%) over the prior month.    

By state, the lowest unemployment rate (seasonally adjusted) was seen in South Australia with 3.2%. The highest was Tasmania with 4.5%

In trend terms, the unemployment rate remained unchanged from January at 3.8% but increased by 0.3% year-on-year.

Meanwhile, seasonally adjusted figures showed that the number of employed persons totalled 14,269,600, up 437,100  (3.2%) on the year and also up by 116,500 (0.8%) over the month.

Monthly hours worked stood at 1.93 billion in February, up 0.8% from the year prior and up 2.8% from the month before.

Australia’s seasonally adjusted participation rate stood at 66.7% in February, up 0.1% from January and up 0.3% from the same period a year ago.

The large increase in employment in February followed larger-than-usual numbers of people in December and January who had a job that they were waiting to start or to return to. This translated into a larger-than-usual flow of people into employment in February and even more so than February last year.

Bjorn Jarvis, ABS head of labour statistics said, “In 2022 and 2023, around 4.3% of employed people in February had not been employed in January. In 2024 this was higher, at 4.7%, and well above the pre-pandemic average for 2015 to 2020 of around 3.9%.”

“In contrast, we again only saw around 3.1% of employed people in January leaving employment by February, which was similar to last year and has remained relatively constant over time. This shows that there is a wider gap than we would usually see between the numbers of people entering employment and leaving employment,” Jarvis said.