The Czech unemployment level was 3.6% in June, which was the same level as in May.

There were 272,684 persons registered with the country’s Labour Office, which was 1,638 less than in May. In year-on-year terms, the unemployment level was up by 0.2 percentage points, or by 22,892 job applicants.

Head of the Labour Office Daniel Kristof commented on the developments in the first half of 2024. He highlighted “three clear super-trends” which are the dropping interest in “low qualified work” and “growth of interest in requalification”.

“The third significant trend is the growing number of people which the Labour Office returns to the labour market,” Kristof commented.

The unemployment level has dropped month-on-month in 12 of the 14 regions in the country and in 52 of the 77 districts. The district of Most in the north of the country along the German border has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 8.4%, replacing the district Karvina in the northeast after the large coal mine CSA shut down and laid off a large part of the staff.

At the end of June 123,813 Ukrainians sheltered in Czechia under the temporary protection scheme, introduced following the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, were working in Czechia.

Altogether 436,143 Ukrainians (67% of them are women) obtained work under the scheme since February 2022, mostly in manual labour on construction sites, manufacture, transportation and manual assembly of products. Some of them have returned to Ukraine since then or left their work positions, Labout Office noted, adding the country has filled in demand for manual labour with sheltered Ukrainians.