Serbia's registered employment slips to 2,355,940 in Q2
The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia counted 2,355,940 registered jobs in the second quarter of 2026: 83 more than in the first quarter, but 14,163 fewer than a year earlier.
Serbia had 2,355,940 registered jobs in the second quarter of 2026, the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, known as RZS, reported on July 30. That is 14,163 fewer than in the same quarter of 2025, a decline of 0.6%.
The total is tracked through three separate registers:
- legal entities, meaning companies, public institutions and cooperatives, employed 1,884,765 people
- entrepreneurs, their employees and the self-employed accounted for 428,550
- registered individual farmers numbered 42,625
Legal entities carry 80.0% of all registered employment, the entrepreneurial sector 18.2% and farmers 1.8%. Against the first quarter of 2026 the headline number rose by 83 people. On a base of more than 2.3 million registered jobs, that is zero. The quarter ended where it began.
Where the 17,422 jobs went
The annual decline is concentrated, not spread evenly. Manufacturing posted the steepest loss, 17,422 fewer employees than in the second quarter of 2025, which works out to roughly 1,450 jobs a month for twelve straight months.
The next largest declines came in:
- wholesale and retail trade and motor vehicle repair, down 4,276
- mining, down 1,134
- public administration, defence and compulsory social security, down 635
Manufacturing shed more jobs on its own than registered employment lost in total: 17,422 against 14,163. The 3,259 gap means other sectors were still hiring and absorbed part of the industrial loss. The release does not name them, but the cushion is there in the arithmetic.
Which category is still growing?
Entrepreneurs and the people they employ. That group added 3,229 over the year, a rise of 0.8%, and it is the only one in positive territory. Twelve months ago it stood at 425,321.
Employment in legal entities fell by 13,766, or 0.7%, from 1,898,531 to 1,884,765. The sharpest fall in relative terms is among registered individual farmers: 3,626 fewer people, down 7.8%, from 46,251 to 42,625. No other category is shrinking that fast against its own size.
What the figure measures, and what it leaves out
Registered employment counts filed jobs pulled from administrative records rather than survey respondents. It carries no estimate of informal work, and a lost job enters the statistics only once the deregistration has actually been processed. Decisions taken in April and May show up in this reading only if they were formally recorded by the end of June.
The next reading, for the third quarter of 2026, is due at the end of October on the same publication cycle. Until then the ratio measured by RZS stands: a quarterly change of 83 people and an annual one of minus 14,163. Employment is not collapsing, it is relocating, out of factory floors and into small private trades.
