Job vacancies may be coming off the boil

Man looking at phone in waiting room. | Newsreel
Job vacancies continue to fall but remain at historic highs | Photo: Skynester

Job vacancies in Australia have fallen 23.5 percent below their May 2022 peak but remain above pre-pandemic levels.

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) job vacancy figures show 2.4 percent of all jobs nationally were vacant in December 2023.

This compared with a 1.6% vacancy rate in 2019 (before the pandemic hit).

Despite the fall in job vacancies in recent months, the 364,000 job vacancies in February 2024 was still 59.8 higher than February 2020.

“The number of job vacancies fell by 6.1 per cent between November 2023 and February 2024,” ABS head of labour statistics Bjorn Jarvis said in a statement.

“The drop in February followed a small fall of 0.8 per cent in November 2023 and was the seventh quarterly drop in a row.”

“The latest Labour Account data also showed that job vacancies continue to make up a much higher proportion of jobs in the labour market than we would typically see.”