Labour Force, Australia, Detailed

Annual averages are important for understanding the current state of the labour market, and providing medium and long-term signals.

However, unusual, sudden and/or extreme changes in the labour market (e.g. changes to regular and seasonal patterns in employment, working hours, job search or availability as a result of COVID-19) can be difficult to account for in the short-term using a 12 month moving average. The application of an annual average to the original regional estimates in Table 16b is unlikely to accurately or quickly detect turning points in the time series during periods of significant change, which should be considered before drawing any conclusions from these estimates.

For advice on reporting data from our regional labour force products (Pivot tables RM1, RM3 and Tables 16, 16B, 16C) see Advice on reporting regional labour force data.

As part of ongoing improvements to the estimation method for Labour Force statistics, the ABS will make some minor changes in how it accounts for some relatively small population groups within the sample.

There are various small groups, which together account for less than 2 per cent of the overall sample, who are more difficult to survey each month, contribute a higher degree of underlying sampling variability, and for whom there is more reliable auxiliary data sources (e.g. regular administrative data). This includes some people who don’t live in private dwellings and some people who live in remote and very remote parts of Australia.

ABS analysis has shown that estimation models that draw on auxiliary data for these groups produce a better quality contribution for them to aggregate Labour Force statistics.

This minor change will result in a small improvement in the quality of estimates, but there will be minimal effect on headline Labour Force estimates. The national participation rate is expected to change by less than 0.1 percentage point and the unemployment rate will remain unchanged.

In order to minimise the number of changes and associated revisions, these small estimation changes will be implemented at the same time as the next quarterly population rebenchmarking process (with November 2023, to be released on 21 December 2023), which will also coincide with the major rebenchmarking related to the final rebasing of population estimates to the 2021 Census.

In making these changes, the estimation method will be backcast to the commencement of the previous sample selection, which was introduced in July 2018.

Further information will be provided in the October 2023 release of Labour Force, Australia on 16 November.