Unemployment in Argentina rose to 7.9% in the first quarter of 2025, according to a report published on Thursday by the government’s statistics institute, known as the INDEC.

This is the highest registered figure since the second quarter of 2021, when the country was still recovering from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The figure represents an increase of more than one point compared to that quarter of 2024, when 6.4% of the economically active population was unemployed. That one-point growth translates to 250,000 more jobless people.

The INDEC report also revealed that 44.4% of the economically active population is employed. Within that universe, 10.8% are underemployed, meaning they have jobs but work less than 35 hours a week and are looking to work more hours. Conversely, 26.6% are overemployed — meaning they work more than 45 hours a week.

Salaries on both the private and public sectors have been falling behind inflation, as the government has not approved collective bargaining increases beyond the price rise.

Last week, when the government published the monthly inflation figure. Florencia Fiorentin, chief economist at EPyCA, told the Herald that the disinflationary policy is based on exchange rate appreciation and frozen wages as price anchors.

“That reduces the level of activity for two reasons that feed back on each other: demand going down — due to a real wage drop — and the relative cheapening of the prices of imported goods,” she said. 

Unemployment was 9% for women and 7% for men, and the highest rate in the country was in the Greater Buenos Aires area. Of all those unemployed, 67.8% had been looking for a job for up to a year, while 32% had been looking for more than a year.

The same day that the INDEC published the report, President Javier Milei said in an interview with the La Nación + TV station that, under his government, there was a “record number of jobs.”

Economist Juan Manuel Telechea called the unemployment figure “very bad.” “It increased compared to the first quarter of 2024, which was one of the worst in terms of economic activity due to the effect of the devaluation,” he said in a post on X. 

“It would have been logical for it to be lower.”

Daniel Schteingart, an economist at the Fundar NGO, said that “formal employment continues to decline.”

“In the first quarter of 2025, only 46% of employed people had registered salaried jobs — the lowest level since 2007,” he added in an X post. “Meanwhile, self-employment and other forms of non-salaried work are growing. A decade-long trend of precariousness is consolidated.”