Brazil's unemployment rate fell to 5.3% in the quarter ending in August, according to the Pnad Contínua household survey released on Tuesday (29) by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), the national statistics agency. It is the lowest rate the survey has recorded for a quarter ending in August since the series began in 2012.
In the previous rolling quarter, ending in May, the rate stood at 5.6%. A year earlier, in the same quarter of 2025, it was also 5.6%. The decline therefore shows up both quarter on quarter and year on year — an unusual combination that points to an underlying trend rather than a seasonal swing.
Record employment
The employed population reached 103.5 million people, the largest on record. That is 774,000 more workers than in the quarter to May, a rise of 0.8%.
The gains were concentrated in two sectors:
- general industry: up 2%, or 265,000 people;
- construction: up 4.1%, or 306,000 people.
On the other side of the ledger, the number of unemployed fell to 5.8 million, down 4.6% — 281,000 fewer people looking for work without finding it. Discouraged workers, who have given up searching because they believe no job is available to them, numbered 2.4 million, flat on the quarter and 11.9% below the level of a year ago.
Formal jobs and informality rise together
Private-sector employees with a signed work card — the formal employment contract in Brazil — reached 39.5 million, also a record. Contributors to the social security system totalled 68.5 million, or 66.2% of everyone in work, another all-time high.
At the same time, the informality rate rose from 37.3% to 37.5% of the employed population, equivalent to 38.8 million workers outside formal arrangements.
The two movements are not contradictory. The market added formal contracts in absolute terms while also absorbing new workers informally. On a growing employment base, informality's share can rise even as formal employment sets records.
Pay and the wage bill
Average real earnings usually received came to R$ 3,777, against R$ 3,752 in the previous quarter. That is still below the series peak of R$ 3,783, reached in the quarter ending in February 2026.
The total wage bill — the sum of everything workers earn — hit a record R$ 385.6 billion, up 1.4% on the quarter and 4.8% over twelve months. It is the figure that matters most to anyone tracking household consumption: it is growing on the strength of more people working, with average pay broadly flat.
With information from the IBGE (Pnad Contínua), Agência Brasil and Estado de Minas.
