Between January and March this year, 103,800 more people were unemployed, which is 3.4% more than in the previous quarter, while there were 11,100 fewer jobs (-0.05%). This is its smallest decline in the first quarter since 2007, the Spanish National Statistics Institute (INE) reported Thursday.
At the end of March, there were 3,127,800 unemployed people and 20,452,800 employed people.
The rise in unemployment in the first quarter of this year is the highest in a first quarter since 2020 when the onset of Covid led to 121,000 people losing their jobs. In the first quarter of last year, 70,900 people became unemployed, fewer than in 2023.
The unemployment rate rose by almost four-tenths of a percentage point in the first quarter to 13.26%, its highest level since the first quarter of 2022. The employment rate remained stable at 58.55% after the number of employed people rose by 92,700 between January and March (+0.4%).
In the last year, unemployment has fallen by 47,000 (-1.5%), and 368,000 jobs have been created (+1.8%), while the number of employed people has increased by 321,100 (+1.4%).
According to the INE, the number of wage earners fell in the first quarter by 23,200 people (-0.1%), with all the adjustment being due to temporary employment (-117,000) since wage earners with permanent contracts increased between January and March by 93,800 (+0.66%) to over 14.35 million. The temporary employment rate, therefore, dropped by six-tenths of a percentage point to 17.28%.