FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 12 May 2026
Youth Capital’s response to QLFS Q1:2026: South Africa’s labour market is not stalling. It is being defunded.
Yesterday’s release of Statistics South Africa’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for Q1:2026 should end any remaining pretence that South Africa’s labour market is in slow recovery. It is not recovering. The system is hollowing out, and that hollowing hits young people first and hardest.
The official rate hides the real picture
The official unemployment rate ticked down 0.2 percentage points year-on-year to 32.7%. However, that figure leaves out millions of people. When we include discouraged job seekers — people who want work but have stopped looking because they no longer believe opportunities exist — the real unemployment rate climbs to 43.7%.
Furthermore, if we count people working fewer hours than they need to survive, labour underutilisation sits at 46.3%. That is up 0.6 percentage points from Q1:2025. In practical terms, close to one in every two working-age South Africans is unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged from looking for work altogether.
Nearly three in five young people are excluded
For young people aged 15 to 34, the official unemployment rate is 45.8%. However, the fuller measure — youth labour underutilisation — climbs to 58.9%. In short, nearly three out of every five young South Africans are unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged. Of the 3.9 million discouraged work-seekers in South Africa, roughly half are under the age of 35.
The NEET figures should bring the country to a standstill. Almost 9.6 million young people aged 15 to 34 are Not in Education, Employment or Training. That is close to one in every two young South Africans. Meanwhile, the 15-to-24 NEET statistic that gets quoted in most coverage (37.6%) understates the scale, because it cuts off at 24 — just as so many young people are entering the years when they should be in stable, decent work. Among young women aged 15 to 24, the NEET rate rose 1.7 percentage points year-on-year to 39.2%, while the rate among young men fell.
Ten years in, the picture is worse, not better
Between Q1:2016 and Q1:2026, the number of unemployed South Africans rose from 5.7 million to 8.1 million. Moreover, the share who have been jobless for a year or longer climbed from 64.9% to 77.4%. In Q1:2026, 77.4% of unemployed adults and 75.5% of unemployed youth had been without work for over a year.
The exclusion is gendered and racialised. The unemployment rate among Black Africans has stayed consistently above the national average for the entire decade, rising from 30.1% in Q1:2016 to 36.4% in Q1:2026. At 40.5% in Q1:2026, Black women remain the single most vulnerable group in the South African labour market. Two in every five Black African women in the labour force have no job.
The geography of exclusion sharpens the point. Unemployment rose in eight of nine provinces this quarter, with the steepest increases in Mpumalanga, followed by Limpopo. Youth unemployment now sits at 56.2% in the Eastern Cape, 53.1% in North West, and 53.1% in the Free State. In the North West, only 37.3% of young people are participating in the labour market. For every ten young people in that province, fewer than four are still trying.
The job losses tell us where the government’s disinvestment is landing
South Africa shed 345,000 jobs in Q1:2026. Community and Social Services took the biggest hit, losing 206,000 jobs. That is the sector where teaching assistants, community health workers, care workers, and the bulk of public employment programmes operate. Construction came next, with 110,000 jobs lost. Crucially, the concentration of losses in Community and Social Services — where many public employment programmes operate — raises serious concerns about the impact of recent reductions and uncertainty in public employment funding.
“The latest QLFS data does not paint a picture of a country slowly recovering. It shows a country slowly closing the door on young people. Two million young people have given up the search entirely. Those are not figures waiting to be ‘activated’ by another announcement. These are young people who have been let down for a decade, and who are now watching government defund some of the very programmes that were starting to work for them.
The concentration of job losses in Community and Social Services is particularly concerning, given the role public employment programmes play in creating entry points into earning opportunities, work experience, and local economic participation. Young people are not asking government to start from scratch. They are asking government to protect, stabilise and scale interventions that are already demonstrating impact.”
— Buhlebethu Magwaza, Project Lead, Youth Capital
These cuts are not a fiscal necessity. They are a political choice. Moreover, the data shows precisely what that choice produces. In a labour market shaped by long-term exclusion, public employment programmes increasingly function not only as income support, but as pathways into work experience, skills development, and longer-term economic participation.
Youth Capital’s call to government, ahead of the MTBPS
- Ring-fence a multi-year PEPs budget, guaranteeing at least 1 million funded public employment opportunities for young people every year, aligned to real local demand.
- Protect and expand proven programmes, including BEEI, CWP, EPWP, and the Social Employment Fund, with measurable, time-bound youth employment targets written into the national budget.
- Move to multi-year funding frameworks for public employment, so that participating young people, implementing partners, and host communities are not held hostage to annual fiscal volatility.
- Recognise public employment as national infrastructure, not a discretionary line item to cut when the macro environment gets noisy.
The MTBPS is the next moment of choice. Ahead of it, government faces a clear policy choice: continue treating public employment as discretionary spending, or recognise it as essential labour market infrastructure in a context of deep and persistent exclusion.
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ENDS
Issued by Youth Capital
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