TalentBuild AIAustralia hiring pulse
Where jobs are opening and how tight the market is — straight from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' quarterly labour data, not job-board guesses.
Latest data: Q2 2026
Job vacancies per unemployed person
0.48
Q2 2025: 0.53. Above 1 means more openings than unemployed people.
Most job openings
Health Care and Social Assistance
56.7 vacancies in Q2 2026
Where the job openings are
Job vacancies by industry, Q2 2026, with change against Q2 2025.
- Health Care and Social Assistance56.7
+3% vs last year
- Professional, Scientific and Technical Services35.7
-7% vs last year
- Accommodation and Food Services34
-11% vs last year
- Administrative and Support Services26.6
+1% vs last year
- Retail Trade26
+3% vs last year
- Manufacturing21.7
+11% vs last year
- Public Administration and Safety21.2
-4% vs last year
- Construction19.9
-11% vs last year
- Wholesale Trade15.9
+51% vs last year
- Other Services11.3
-4% vs last year
- Education and Training11
-10% vs last year
- Mining10.3
+3% vs last year
- Transport, Postal and Warehousing9.2
-14% vs last year
- Financial and Insurance Services8.9
-28% vs last year
- Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services4.4
-24% vs last year
- Arts and Recreation Services3.9
-9% vs last year
- Electricity, Gas, Water and Waste Services3.7
+9% vs last year
- Information Media and Telecommunications3.6
-8% vs last year
Openings per unemployed person
Recent quarters. Moves around quarter to quarter.
What this means for your search
- Industries with many openings are the easiest places to start — but check your own niche, since broad industries hide a lot of variation.
- Pair this with the salary guide to see what roles in each industry actually pay before you negotiate.
Turn the market into a plan
See what roles in the industries you're targeting actually pay, then check how your resume reads against a real job.
How to read this. Counts are rounded in the source and cover Australia as a whole — there is no regional split in this data, and your specific niche can behave differently from its industry. Year-on-year comparisons use the same quarter last year to avoid seasonal swings.
Contains data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Job Vacancies, Australia and Labour Force, Australia releases, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). There is no readily available official Australian series for retrenchments by industry at this granularity, so this covers job openings and market tightness only.