INEGI reported on Friday that unemployment in Mexico rose to 3.0 percent in August, up from 2.9 percent in July and in August 2025, leaving 1.88 million people without work. The national statistics institute said that was about 87,000 more unemployed people than a year earlier, even as the labour force grew by 1.3 million over the same period to 62.6 million people.
Who Pays for the Numbers
The people at the bottom keep absorbing the shock. INEGI’s own figures show employment rose by 1.2 million over the year to 60.7 million, but that didn’t stop the ranks of the jobless from growing. The share of people aged 15 and over who work or seek work rose to 59.3 percent from 58.8 percent. More bodies are being pulled into the labour market, and more are still getting left behind.
INEGI said the August reading came from its ENOE, the National Survey of Occupation and Employment, which visits a little over 150,000 homes each quarter. Someone counts as unemployed only if they did not work even one hour in the survey week and had actively looked for a job. The 3.0 percent figure is not adjusted for the seasons. On INEGI’s seasonally adjusted series, unemployment stayed at 2.7 percent, unchanged from July and 0.1 point above August 2025.
Precarity as the Normal Order
The real story sits deeper than the headline rate. INEGI said 55.0 percent of workers, or 33.4 million people, were in informal employment, up from 54.8 percent a year earlier. Informal means working without social-security protection, or for a business that is not registered. That’s not stability. That’s a workforce pushed into the shadows, where protection disappears and the bosses get flexibility while workers get exposure.
Another 7.0 percent of workers, some 4.3 million people, were underemployed, meaning they wanted and were available to work more hours. Seasonally adjusted, that rate rose to 6.8 percent from 6.4 percent in July. INEGI also counts 5.0 million people outside the labour force who say they could work but are not looking. Its broadest gauge, called critical working conditions, reached 37.8 percent of workers, up from 37.3 percent a year earlier.
People don’t live inside neat statistical categories. They live in the squeeze those categories describe.
Where Jobs Vanish and Where They Appear
Manufacturing employed 9.7 million people in August, 263,000 fewer than a year earlier. Farming lost 290,000 workers and retail and wholesale trade 161,000. Construction added 146,000. Restaurants and hotels added 538,000 jobs, a catch-all group of other services 790,000, and government 242,000. The shifts show a labour market moving people around, not lifting them out of insecurity.
A second source of formal jobs, registrations with IMSS, the Mexican Social Security Institute, recorded a net gain of 38,319 jobs in August, after a loss of 19,550 in July. Traditional jobs rose by 86,765, while registrations of app-based platform workers fell by 48,446. Even so, platform registrations are up 49.8 percent over twelve months, IMSS said. Over twelve months, IMSS-registered jobs rose by 343,556, or 1.5 percent, to 22.8 million. In August 2023 the monthly gain was 111,736, according to the newspaper El Economista.
The formal sector’s numbers don’t erase the broader squeeze. They just show how unevenly the system distributes what little it offers.
The Bigger Machine Behind the Labor Market
The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that formal employment fell by about 9,100 jobs in August, a second straight monthly decline. The United States buys about 83 percent of Mexico’s exports, according to the consultancy Deloitte. Most goods still enter duty-free, but US tariffs fall on cars, auto parts, machinery and steel. Reuters reported that in July Washington declined to renew the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, opting for annual reviews instead. New foreign investment in Mexico fell 13 percent in the first half of 2026, Reuters found, and fixed investment fell year on year for 19 straight months through May, according to IMEF, Mexico’s finance executives’ institute.
Banxico, the central bank, held its overnight rate at 6.50 percent on Thursday 24 September. It was the third meeting in a row without a change. Banxico said it need not track the US Federal Reserve mechanically. Private forecasters polled by Banxico in August expected growth of 1.3 percent this year. INEGI publishes the September figures on Thursday 22 October, Banxico releases the minutes of its September meeting on 8 October and decides rates again on 5 November.