Home topics news News News The number businesses should actually be watching right now isn’t the unemployment rate Yajush Gupta February 23, 2026 Australia’s unemployment rate held at 4.1% in January. But Deputy CFO Emma Seymour says the number that matters for shift workers tells a very different story. What’s happening : Australia’s unemployment rate held at 4.1% in January 2026, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with employment rising to 14.7 million people. Why this matters : The ABS underemployment rate, at 5.9%, captures some of this, but industry-level hour reductions may not fully surface in headline figures. Australia’s labour market started 2026 looking stable on paper. The unemployment rate held at 4.1% in January, and the number of employed Australians rose to 14,705,800, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics . Full-time employment increased by 50,500 in seasonally adjusted terms, and monthly hours worked across all jobs climbed to 2,013 million. But for people working shifts, the picture inside those numbers is more complicated. Steady rate, softer hours Emma Seymour, CFO at Deputy, a shift work management platform, says the headline unemployment figure is not the most useful measure for understanding how shift workers are actually faring right now. “Unemployment holding at 4.1% sounds stable,” she says. “But for shift workers, the more important number right now is hours, not headcount.” Deputy’s own data shows average shift hours per active employee fell from 70.6 hours to 65.15 hours between October and January. That is nearly an 8%