Unemployment in Brazil fell to 5.3% in the quarter ending in July, the lowest for that period since statistics agency IBGE began the series in 2012. In practice, 5.8 million people are still looking for work, but that is 503,000 fewer than in the quarter ending in April, when the rate was 5.8%. The figures come from PNAD Continua, the national household survey, released on Thursday (27).
The labor market keeps creating jobs despite high interest rates, which make credit more expensive and usually cool the economy. The employed population hit a record 103.3 million, with about 1 million more workers in the quarter, according to Ponta Negra News' coverage of the IBGE data. The result matched the median of forecasts collected by Reuters.
The warning sign is in the wallet. Average real income, already adjusted for inflation, stood at R$ 3,762 a month and slipped 0.7% in the quarter, a change IBGE considers stable. Compared with the same period of 2025, when the average was R$ 3,642, workers now take home R$ 120 more a month, roughly the cost of one extra trip to the supermarket.
Understanding the numbers
PNAD Continua measures unemployment over rolling three-month periods that overlap to give more precise readings. Real income shows what a paycheck actually buys after price increases are stripped out. When IBGE calls a figure stable, the variation was too small to count as a real shift.
The sum of all wages earned in the country, known as the real wage bill, hit a record R$ 383.5 billion, up 4.1% in a year, an extra R$ 15.1 billion flowing through the economy. In the quarter, however, growth was just 0.2%, nearly flat. That loss of momentum in pay supports the reading of a job market that is still hot but delivering smaller gains to workers, as UOL Economia pointed out.
Construction drove job creation in the quarter, adding 371,000 workers, a 5.1% rise. According to William Kratochwill, the IBGE analyst for the survey, the advance came mainly from bricklayers and building laborers, as reported by Jornal Grande Bahia. Over one year, transport, storage and mail services also grew 5.4%, a segment that includes app delivery riders.
Not every number is positive. Informality rose from 37.2% to 37.5% of employed workers, with 13.8 million people working without a signed labor card, 477,000 more in the quarter. Without the labor card, a worker has no unemployment insurance, paid vacation or the year-end bonus known in Brazil as the 13th salary. Discouragement, people who stopped looking for work because they believed they would not find a job, fell 9.7% to 2.3 million.