The employment rate in Iran stood at 36.6% (23.43 million) in the last financial year’s fourth quarter (Dec. 22, 2022-March 20), unchanged compared with the same quarter of the year before, according to the Statistical Center of Iran.
Employment is defined as persons of working age engaged in any activity to produce goods or provide services for pay or profit, whether at work during the reference period or not at work due to a temporary absence from a job, or to working-time arrangement.
Employment rates for men and women were 62% and 11.2% in Q4 respectively, which constituted 19.84 million men and 3.45 million women.
Employment rate was 36.1% (17.91 million people) in urban areas and 38.2% (5.52 million) in rural areas.
The share of employment of university graduates stood at 27.4% of the total employed population, wherein male and female graduate employment rates were 22.9% and 49.7%, respectively. In urban and rural areas, graduate employment rates stood at 33.2% and 8.9% of the total number of job-holders, respectively.
Q4 statistics show that 35.6% of the country’s labor force worked more than 49 hours per week, indicating a 1.1% decrease over the same period of last year.
The services sector employed 53.7% of the Iranian employed population (12.58 million), 1.8% higher than the corresponding period of last year, whereas industrial and agricultural sectors provided 33.2% and 13% of jobs respectively.
Over 7.78 million were employed in the industrial sector, down 0.4 year-on-year and 3.05 million worked in agriculture, posting a 1.5% decrease YOY.
The services sector consists of wholesale and retail trade; restaurants and hotels; transport, storage and communications; financing, insurance, real-estate and business services; as well as community, social, education, health and personal services.
The sector employed 10.33 million men and 2.24 million women in the three-month period, such that 6.87 million men and 963,265 women were working in the industrial sector and 2.89 million men and 373,680 women worked in the agriculture sector.
Services accounted for 61.2% or 10.95 million of all jobs in urban areas and 29.6% or 1.63 million of jobs in rural areas. The industrial sector made up 34% or 6.09 million of the jobs in urban areas and comprised 30.5% or 1.9 million of employment in rural areas.
This is while 4.8% or 855,651 of the total jobs in urban areas and 39.9% or 2.2 million of the jobs in rural areas were in the agriculture sector.
Zanjan Province registered the highest employment rate of 44.6% while Ilam filed the lowest employment rate of 30.1% among all Iranian provinces. Tehran’s employment rate stood at 36.9%.