ABS data shows job mobility continues to decline. Photo: djile.
The job mobility rate continued to decline into this year with little more than a million employed Australians changing their jobs over the 12 months to February 2026.
New Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data released on Friday (31 July) showed employees continued to have a higher job mobility rate than self-employed people, at 8 per cent compared with 3 per cent.
Younger people continue to be more likely to change jobs, while the decline in job mobility is larger among women.
The job mobility rate is the number of people who changed their employer or business during the year to February 2026, as a proportion of people who were employed over the same period.
In the year to February, job mobility declined for women by 0.8 percentage points to 7.1 per cent. The male job mobility rate decreased by 0.2 percentage points to 7.4 per cent.
ABS head of labour statistics, Robert Long, said job mobility tended to decrease with age, with people aged 15 to 24 most likely to change jobs (with a job mobility rate of 12.0 per cent).
In contrast, only 1.2 per cent of employed people aged 65 years and over changed jobs in the year to February 2026.
“Just over one million employed people (or 7.2 per cent) changed their employer or business in the year to February 2026, compared with 7.7 per cent over the previous year,” Mr Long said.
“While this decreasing job mobility is a continuation of a long-term trend since the 1970s, there have been some notable peaks in job mobility over this period.
“These have generally occurred around times of economic uncertainty, such as leading into the recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s, and during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The rental, hiring and real estate services industry had the highest job mobility rate at 11 per cent, followed by mining and construction (both 9 per cent).
The arts and recreation services category, however, had the highest proportion of people who changed jobs over the period to a different industry (86 per cent).
The electricity, gas, water and waste services category was close behind on that count, with 83 per cent changing industries all together.
The construction industry had the highest proportion of people changing jobs who stayed in the same industry (74 per cent), followed by health care and social assistance (65 per cent).
In addition to data on job mobility, the ABS also released results of its Participation, Job Search and Mobility Survey, which includes data on people without a job who are looking for work or are available to work.
In February, there were 1.7 million people who were not working but wanted to work, and 1.1 million people who were available to start work, including 640,000 unemployed people.
Of the 22.4 million people in the resident civilian population who were aged 15 years or over, 14.5 million were employed; 1.7 million were potential workers (not working but wanted to work); 6.2 million did not want to work or were permanently not able to work.
Of the 1.7 million potential workers, 300,000 were attached to a job that they were about to start or were away from a job that they could return to, and 1.4 million were without a job.
Between February 2025 and February 2026, the number of potential workers without job attachment remained steady at 1.4 million.
Over the same period, employment rose from 14.3 to 14.5 million.
Original Article published by Chris Johnson on Region Canberra.
