Morocco’s unemployment climbs to 10.5% as 173,000 jobs vanish in three months

What did the planners report on 3 November?

Morocco’s High Commission for Planning, the kingdom’s statistics office, published its third-quarter labour figures on 3 November, and the numbers moved in the wrong direction on almost every line. The strict unemployment rate, people aged 15 and over without paid work, actively looking for it and available to start, reached 10.5% between July and September, up from 9.5% in the second quarter. The number of strictly unemployed people rose by 103,000 in three months to 1.224 million, and the number of people in income-generating employment fell by a net 173,000, or 1.6%, to 10.47 million.

The figures returned to public debate three days later, when the Employment Ministry’s 2027 budget document carried the same numbers into parliament’s budget season. The ministry puts the labour force at 11.7 million people, a participation rate of 41.8%, and attributes part of the rise to new graduates entering the labour market and the farm job losses to the end of the harvest season. The release is the first under the HCP’s new Labour Force Survey, which replaces the old National Employment Survey on an expanded annual sample of 135,000 households; and which the HCP says is not directly comparable with the old series.

Where did the jobs go, and who lost them?

The losses were overwhelmingly rural. The countryside lost a net 148,000 people in income-generating employment in the quarter, against 25,000 in towns and cities. The national employment rate fell from 38.2% to 37.4%, and the labour force itself shrank by 70,000 to 11.694 million. Urban unemployment reached 12.5% against 6.9% in rural areas.

By sector, the picture is lopsided. Agriculture, forestry and fishing shed a net 145,000 jobs, a fall of 5.6%, and services lost 96,000, down 1.8%. Construction gave up 3,000. Only industry added jobs, up 69,000, or 4.8%. Services remain the largest employer, with 5.155 million people, or 49.2% of all income-generating employment, followed by agriculture at 23.2%, industry at 14.6% and construction at 12.9%.

The pain is concentrated among the young and among women. Unemployment among 15- to 24-year-olds reached 30.5%, up 3.3 points in a single quarter and the largest increase of any age group; for 25- to 34-year-olds it rose from 14.5% to 16%. Women’s unemployment climbed 1.9 points to 16.7% while men’s rose 0.6 points to 8.7%, leaving women’s rate nearly double men’s. The broader underutilisation rate, which adds people available for work and those working fewer hours than they want, rose from 18.9% to 19.6%, affecting 2.4 million people, half of them strictly unemployed.

What can the numbers not yet tell us?

The HCP itself draws the first line. A net change between two quarters, the office stresses, does not by itself show structural destruction of jobs: seasonal and cyclical factors move the quarterly figures, and the end of the harvest season is one of them. The release does not separate how many of the 145,000 farm jobs lost were seasonal posts that come back with the next cycle, and how many reflect a smaller harvest or less water.

The second open question is the graduates. The ministry says new graduates entering the market helped push the rate up, but neither the ministry’s document nor the HCP release says how many graduates arrived, in which fields, or how many found work in the weeks after the survey’s reference period closed. The graduate unemployment rate, at 18.1% for holders of advanced qualifications, is a stock, not a flow: it cannot say whether this year’s cohort is faring worse than last year’s. Nor do the figures show what the state will actually do; the employment measures inside the 2027 budget proposal, their size and their timing, are not yet public in detail.

Why does a 0.9-point rise carry so much weight?

Because of who it hits, and because of what else is squeezing the same households. A youth unemployment rate of 30.5% means nearly one in three young Moroccans who want paid work cannot find it, in a country where the young are also the most likely to be educated; the rate for holders of advanced qualifications is 18.1%. That combination, educated and idle, is the one that has historically turned an economic statistic into a political question, and Morocco’s own recent history carries the reminder: last year’s youth protests put jobs, health and education at the centre of the public debate.

The labour figures also arrive in the same week as the cost-of-living pressure that has dominated the autumn. The government has just paused tomato exports to African markets to steady domestic supply, after retail prices reached 17 to 18 dirhams a kilo, and a price commission is working on purchasing power. Households feel both sides at once, fewer wages coming in, higher prices going out, and the HCP’s own confidence survey shows it: the household confidence index fell to 59.2 points, and 61.3% of households expect unemployment to rise over the next twelve months. For the government, the figures land in the middle of the 2027 budget season, when the employment chapter is the one the opposition will read first.

What do the two numbers that matter most actually say?

Strip the release to its two load-bearing figures and they are 30.5% and 148,000. The first is the youth rate: nearly one in three young jobseekers without work, up 3.3 points in a quarter, with underutilisation among the young at 44.5%. The second is the rural job loss: 148,000 of the 173,000 net jobs lost, almost all of them in agriculture. Together they describe a labour market whose weakness is concentrated where the state has the fewest levers in the short term; the countryside, where work follows the harvest and the rains, and the young, whose first job depends on employers’ confidence about the next year.

Against that, the HCP’s own caution deserves its full weight. A single quarter cannot diagnose a structural break, and the third quarter carries the harvest’s end in its numbers by construction. The ministry’s two explanations, graduates arriving, harvest ending, are not evasions; they are the two seasonal facts that every third-quarter release in Morocco contains. What would turn them from explanations into excuses is repetition: if the fourth quarter, when the harvest effect has passed, still shows the rate above 10% and the rural losses unrecovered, the seasonal story stops working.

What happens if the fourth quarter does not recover?

If the losses persist into the fourth quarter, the first consequence is political, and it arrives through the budget. The 2027 finance bill is already before parliament, and an unemployment rate that stays above 10% gives the opposition a number to return to at every hearing; and gives the Employment Ministry a harder negotiation for its own measures. A second consequence runs through consumption: with 61.3% of households expecting unemployment to rise, spending stays cautious.

A third consequence runs through migration, the channel by which Moroccan youth unemployment has always exported itself. When the formal sector cannot absorb graduates, the pressure shows up at Ceuta and in the visa queues. And a fourth runs through agriculture itself: a sector that can shed 145,000 jobs in a quarter is a sector exposed to water and climate, and every dry year now moves the national employment total. The tomato pause this week was the price signal of that exposure; the jobs figures are the employment signal of the same fact.

What should readers watch for now?

The next hard data point is the fourth-quarter Labour Force Survey, due early next year: it will show whether the 173,000 jobs were a seasonal dip that the harvest cycle explains, or the beginning of a slide the seasonal story cannot cover. Before that, the parliamentary debate on the 2027 budget will show what the Employment Ministry intends to spend, and on whom; the size of its employment measures, their target groups, and whether the youth rate or the rural losses get the larger share.

Watch also the price front, where the tomato pause and the price commission’s work will show whether household pressure eases before the end of the year, If industry keeps adding jobs at the third quarter’s pace while services stabilise, the story changes; if the rural losses repeat in the fourth quarter, it hardens.