Argentina's unemployment rate rose to 7.9% in the second quarter of 2026, up 0.3 percentage points from the same period in each of the previous two years, according to official data the national statistics agency INDEC released Thursday. Roughly 73,000 more people are now looking for work than a year earlier.
The bigger shift is in the kind of jobs Argentines are finding. Informal employment among salaried workers climbed to 37.9%, the highest share in nearly 18 years, while overall informality — including self-employed and unregistered workers — reached 45%. INDEC counted 348,000 new informal jobs in the quarter, the fastest pace of informal hiring since at least 2023.
The headline job-creation number looks positive at first glance — the economy added 265,000 jobs in the quarter — but economist Diego Piccardo of the Fundación Libertad y Progreso cautioned that the labor market is "restructuring itself downward": registered salaried and self-employed positions actually fell by 83,000 even as total employment rose. The consultancy LCG attributed rising labor-force participation to "the need for households to supplement their income," rather than to new opportunity.
Other trends point the same way. Self-employed workers, many in gig-economy jobs, now make up 25.5% of the employed population, up 1.8 percentage points from a year earlier. More than a quarter of workers — 27.6% — now put in 45 hours or more a week, up from 26.3% in 2024. The share of workers who are salaried employees fell to 70.5%, a level last seen during the pandemic.
The data complicates the government's economic narrative just as it heads into next week's IMF program review and defends a second tax amnesty aimed at coaxing undeclared dollars into the formal system. Milei's government has pointed to falling inflation — 1.7% in August, the lowest in 14 months — as its central achievement. The INDEC figures suggest that even as prices stabilize, the jobs Argentines are finding to cope with the transition are increasingly informal, part-time by necessity, or stretched across longer hours for the same registered pay.