Australia’s Job Market Bounces Back to Life in August

With participation in the job market also rising over the month, the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.7% in August, the Australian Bureau of Statistics said Thursday.

The recovery in employment growth, which included 62,100 part-time jobs, snaps a recent soft patch for the job market that saw the unemployment rate rise from around 3.5% earlier in the year.

With the RBA saying recently that it will assess inflation and jobs data closely when determining the course of interest rates, Thursday’s numbers are likely to stoke the case for at least one more rate hike before the end of the year.

The large jump in employment in August came after a small drop in July, which occurred around the school-holiday period, the ABS said.

Looking at the past two months, average employment growth was around 32,000 people a month, similar to the average growth recorded over the past year, the ABS added.

The participation rate also increased to a record high of 67.0% in August, while monthly hours worked fell 0.5% over the month.

The underemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 6.6% in August, 0.6 percentage points higher than in the same month of 2022, but was still around 2.2 percentage points lower than before the pandemic, the ABS added.

Write to James Glynn at james.glynn@wsj.com; @JamesGlynnWSJ