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May is usually the sweetest month for the labour market in Spain, as businesses prepare for the summer season and the wave of new hires begins in preparation to break employment records. This year is no exception.
Unemployment has been Spain's Achilles heel for decades. However, this year, it has finally managed to fall below the 2.5 million mark after a reduction of 57,835, according to data published this Tuesday by the national Ministry of Labour. It has taken almost 17 years for this to happen. With this, the total number of people registered on the SEPE (the public employment service) lists has fallen to 2,454,883, the lowest it has been since July 2008, when the Great Recession caused labour to plummet.
Spain is still recovering from that crisis, despite this year's achievement. It is the European state with the highest level of unemployment, double the EU average.
On the other hand, employment is also growing year after year, although the rate this year is slightly lower than that in 2024. In May, the Social Security system added 195,736 contributors on average, which brings the total number very close to 21.8 million (21,784,375).
Despite the record number, this is the lowest rise in more than a decade (excluding the year of the pandemic, which cannot be taken into account as it is not considered representative for the statistics). We would have to go back to 2013 to find a worse one, which means that the pace of year-on-year job creation has slowed to 2.17%, just over a tenth of a point less than in April and three tenths less than last year, partly as a result of Easter falling in April and many companies having already brought hiring forward. This means that Spain has created a total of 462,581 new jobs compared to a year ago - an important figure, but already lower than the more than half a million that were generated two years ago and far from the million jobs that were created in May 2022.
All sectors of activity, except the domestic ones (which lost 1,300 employees), gained workers in the last month. Logically, the hotel and catering sector was the biggest employer, creating half of all jobs (more than 76,000), followed by administrative activities and auxiliary services (22,000), commerce (9,300) and transport (more than 8,000), the latter leading year-on-year growth with a rate of almost 7%. The construction and manufacturing industries also gained more than 7,200 contributors each in May.
It’s worth highlighting the strong performance of the agricultural sector, which gained 18,230 new affiliates in the special agricultural system, a 2.7% increase compared to April, as well as another 2,000 salaried workers in these activities but under the General Social Security Scheme.
A downside of the jobs created this past month of May is that the vast majority were essentially seasonal jobs, which means that fewer permanent contracts (40%) and more temporary contracts were signed this month. Moreover, half of the permanent contracts were either permanent discontinuous contracts activated for the summer season, after a whole winter without activity (37%) ,or part-time jobs (22%); in other words, precarious jobs predominated, while only 40% were permanent full-time contracts.
Another sign that permanent contracts are lasting less and less is that in May, 552,000 permanent contracts were signed, but for only 521,000 people. This means that 31,000 people had more than one permanent contract in the same month, lasting just a few days or even hours. Since the labor reform came into effect, 1.25 million people have signed more than one permanent contract within the same working month.
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