The February 2018 unemployment rate was 7.6%, down 0.3 percentage points (p.p.) from the previous month’s level, 0.5 p.p. from three months before and 2.3% from the same month of 2017. That value corresponds to a downwards revision of 0.2 p.p. from the provisional estimate released one month ago and only going back to April 2004 it is possible to find a rate lower than that.
Statistics Portugal estimates that the February unemployed population was 395.1 thousand people, having decreased by 3.2% from the previous month’s level (13.0 thousand fewer people). The employed population estimate was
4,783.4 thousand people, having increased by 0.1% (4.5 thousand more people) from the previous month’s level.
The provisional unemployment rate estimate for March 2018 was 7.4%. For this month, the provisional estimate for the unemployed population was 381.2 thousand people and that for the employed population was 4,791.8 thousand people.