Serbia's Unemployment Rate Falls to 7.2%, Fewer Employed
RZS: in the second quarter of 2026, Serbia's unemployment rate fell below eight percent for the first time, to 7.2 percent, but 45,800 fewer people were employed than a year earlier.
Serbia’s unemployment rate stood at 7.2 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the first time since the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (RZS) began tracking the figure quarterly that it has fallen below eight percent. The office published the data today as part of its regular Labor Force Survey.
According to the release, the number of employed people in the second quarter stood at 2,840,100, the number of unemployed at 220,200, and the number of people outside the labor force, meaning people who neither work nor look for work, at 2,516,800. The employment rate was 50.9 percent and the inactivity rate 45.1 percent.
A comparison with the same quarter last year puts the drop in the unemployment rate in a different light. Against the second quarter of 2025, the number of employed people is down by 45,800 and the number of unemployed by 46,800. At the same time, the number of people outside the labor force rose by 61,900. In terms of rates, employment is down 0.6 percentage points, unemployment down 1.3 percentage points, and inactivity up 1.3 percentage points.
Why is the rate falling while fewer people are employed?
By definition, the unemployment rate is calculated as the ratio of unemployed people to the total labor force, meaning the sum of employed and unemployed people, not to the population as a whole. When someone stops looking for work and moves into the inactive category, they drop out of that calculation altogether, so the unemployment rate can fall even as the number of employed people is also falling. That is exactly what happened, according to the published figures, between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026: the number of inactive people grew by 61,900, while both employment and unemployment declined at the same time.
Part of the drop also comes from the comparison within 2026 itself. RZS reported an unemployment rate of 8.9 percent for the first quarter, with 2,836,000 employed and 276,300 unemployed. Against that quarter, the number of employed people in the April to June period rose by about 4,100, while the number of unemployed fell by 56,100, a typical seasonal pattern, since the labor market usually picks up in the warmer months.
RZS notes that survey based unemployment, measured under the International Labour Organization’s methodology through a sample of households, does not match the registered employment figures published by the National Employment Service (NES) from its own records. Under that separate methodology, registered employment in the second quarter of 2026 stood at 2,355,940 people, a figure RZS published on July 30.
The Labor Force Survey for the second quarter arrives a little over a month after the same office released average wage data for June. According to those figures, which our newspaper covered earlier, the average net wage in June stood at 120,401 dinars, while the median wage, the amount that splits employees exactly in half, was considerably lower, at 94,281 dinars. Taken together, the two surveys, one on employment and one on wages, paint a broader picture of the labor market, one in which the numerical drop in unemployment is matched by a rise in the number of people who have left it altogether.
