Jobless rate climbs to 5.3% in July 2025
MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine unemployment rate spiked to 5.3% in July 2025 from 3.7% last June, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) on Wednesday, September 10.
This means that 2.59 million people were unemployed as of July 2025.
Meanwhile, the employment rate decreased to 94.7% in July this year from 96.3% last June. The PSA said that this puts the number of employed persons at 46.05 million.
Underemployment, or those who are employed but are in need of more income, also increased in July 2025, rising from 12.1% to 14.6%.
“In terms of magnitude, 6.80 million of the 46.05 million employed individuals expressed the desire to have additional hours of work in their present job or to have an additional job, or to have a new job with longer hours of work in July 2025,” the PSA said in its report.
The large majority of the country’s employed pool are wage and salary workers, comprising 68.7% of working persons. Self-employed persons account for 24.7%, unpaid family workers for 4.0% and employers in their own family businesses at 2.6%.
Most of the employed persons in the country also came from the service sector, according to the PSA. Service workers represented 62.8%, followed by industry at 18.7% and agriculture at 18.5%.
Several subsectors saw large annual increases in the number of employed persons:
- Administrative and support service activities (up by 296,000)
- Transportation and storage (up by 208,000)
- Human health and social work activities (up by 169,000)
- Manufacturing (up by 109,000)
- Education (up by 96,000)
Meanwhile, several subsectors also incurred major losses in employees:
- Agriculture and forestry (down by 1.38 million)
- Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles (down by 897,000)
- Fishing and aquaculture (down by 173,000)
- Construction (down by 147,000)
- Accommodation and food service activities (down by 69,000)
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