The December 2017 unemployment rate was 8.0%, down by 0.1 percentage points (p.p.) from the previous month’s level, by 0.5 p.p. from three months before and by 2.2% from the same month of 2016. That value corresponds to an upwards revision of 0.2 p.p. from the provisional estimate released one month ago and only going back to July 2004 it is possible to find a rate lower than that.
Statistics Portugal estimates that the November unemployed population was 412.3 thousand people, having decreased by 1.3% from the previous month’s level (5.5 thousand fewer people). The employed population estimate was
4,771.5 thousand people, having increased by 0.4% (19.7 thousand more people) from the previous month’s level.
The provisional unemployment rate estimate for January 2018 was 7.9%. For this month, the provisional estimate for the unemployed population was 410.6 thousand people and that for the employed population was 4,773.4 thousand people.