101,022 work with no contract, 90,020 are unemployed: the grey number has overtaken the official one

Unemployment fell to 11.3 percent. The government can put that on a billboard. But in the same quarter the number of informally employed people reached 101,022 - more than all the officially unemployed in the country, who number 90,020.

So there are more people working without a contract than people with no job at all. That is the figure that describes the real state of the labour market, not the rate on the billboard.

According to the State Statistical Office data for the second quarter of 2026, the active population stands at 798,718 people, of whom 708,698 are employed. Compared with the same period last year, the number of employed rose by one percent, and the number of unemployed fell by 1.5 percent. The activity rate is 52.5 percent, the employment rate 46.6 percent.

Where the grey hundred thousand actually work

Informal employment grew by 7.2 percent compared with the previous quarter. The largest share - 51,487 people, or 51 percent - works in agriculture, forestry and fishing. A further 17.2 percent are in construction.

Both sectors are seasonal, which means part of the jump was expected. But the seasonal argument explains why the number rises in summer, not why a hundred thousand people working off the books exist in the first place. They accrue no service years, they get no sick leave, they build no basis for a pension. Their work goes into GDP but into none of their own personal documents.

Informal employment is not just undeclared work in the narrow sense. It covers workers with no formalised contract, the self-employed in informal economic units, and unpaid family workers - the woman who spends the whole year working a field that is not hers, the son helping out at his father's construction firm.

Who is left outside

Youth unemployment among 15 to 29-year-olds reaches 24 percent - double the national average. Women's participation in the labour market is 43 percent, against 62.4 percent for men. Among the unemployed, 63.6 percent are men and 36.4 percent women. Among the employed - 57.7 percent men, 42.3 percent women.

And that 11.3 percent rate, read here as a success, is nearly double the European Union average, which in June stood at six percent, or 6.3 percent in the eurozone.

The number is falling. The question is whether it is falling because people are finding work, or because they are giving up on registering as unemployed - and heading out to a field where nobody counts them.