unemployment rate falls to 7.5% in the quarter ending in November

The unemployment rate in Brazil fell to 7.5% in the quarter comprising the months of September, October and November, according to data from the Continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD), released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) this Friday (29).

The drop is the third consecutive drop in unemployment recorded by the survey and represents the lowest rate for a quarter ending in November since 2014. In the previous quarter, ending in August, the index was 7.8%. In the same period in 2022, it was 8.1%.

Currently, Brazil has 8.2 million unemployed people. In the quarter, among employed people, there was growth of 0.9%, which reached a record of 100.5 million people, the highest number in the historical series started in 2012.

In the year, the increase was 0.8%, with 815 thousand more people employed. The sum of employed and unemployed people increased by 0.6% in the quarter, estimated at 108.7 million. The population outside the force totaled 66.5 million.

The survey also showed that the number of employees with a work contract in the private sector was 37.7 million, an increase of 1.4% (515 thousand more) in the quarter and 2.5% (935 thousand more) in the year . It was the second largest contingent since the beginning of the survey’s historical series, in 2012, behind only June 2014, when 37.8 million were registered.

The number of unregistered employees in the private sector (13.4 million) was the highest in the series, despite remaining stable in the quarter and year. The number of self-employed workers remained at 25.6 million people.

The informality rate was 39.2% of the employed population (or 39.4 million informal workers) against 39.1% in the previous quarter and 38.9% in the same quarter of 2022.

The real average monthly income usually received from all jobs by employed people was estimated at R$ 3,034 in the quarter from September to November 2023, registering growth of 2.3% compared to the quarter from June to August 2023 and growth of 3. 8% compared to the same quarter of the previous year.