Colombia | In July, unemployment rate continued to fall and employment to increase

The national unemployment rate for July was 9.6%, 1.4 percentagepoints lower than last year's July rate (11.0%), being the lowest rate for themonth of July since 2015. On the margin, compared to June of this year, theunemployment rate was down 0.3 percentage points.

Key points

• Key points:
• Employment for the month was 23.2 million, a high level that surpassed the high levels seen during the January-June 2023 period (22.7million) and even last June, when employment observed a strong upward boost. At the urban level, employment stood at 11.0 million people, similar to June, buthigher than the average for the first half of the year (10.7 million).
• The decrease in the national unemployment rate in July respondedto a rebound in annual job creation, which accelerated to 5.1% in July, higherthan that of June (4.7%), which in turn was 3 percentage points higher than that of May (1.7%). At the urban level, on the other hand, annual job creations lowed down to 6.2% in July, compared to 6.6% in June, which was almost 5 percentage points higher than in May (1.9%).
• Services, as a whole, were the largest generators of employment in the last year (+ 795 thousand jobs), led by arts and entertainment (+ 219thousand jobs), retail (+ 176 thousand jobs), accommodation and food (+ 163thousand jobs) and transportation (+ 122 thousand jobs). Individually, the sector that generated the most jobs during the year was construction, which contributed 234 thousand additional jobs during the year.
• By category, women, non-wage-earners and large cities contributed the most to annual job creation in July.

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