KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia saw its lowest unemployment rate in 11 years last November, reaching 2.9 per cent, with the number of unemployed people declining to 518,400, according to the Statistics Department.<\/p>\n
The last time the unemployment rate dropped below three per cent was in November 2014, according to the country’s chief statistician Mohd Uzir Mahidin.<\/p>\n
“The total number of employed persons increased by 0.2 per cent to 17.09 million from 17.06 million in October 2025,” Mohd Uzir said in a statement, quoted by local media.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“Meanwhile, the number of unemployed persons declined marginally by 0.1 per cent to 518,400 from 518,900 a month earlier.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mohd Uzir said that favourable economic conditions in November continued to support steady growth in the labour market.<\/p>\n
He added that the number of categorised employees had risen by 0.1 per cent to 12.78 million, compared with 12.76 million in October.<\/p>\n
“Own-account” workers – those who are considered self-employed – also increased by 0.3 per cent to 3.26 million from 3.25 million in the previous month.<\/p>\n
With regards to unemployment, Mohd Uzir said that those available for and actively seeking work accounted for 79.8 per cent of total unemployment. This was a small drop of 0.1 per cent to 413,500 from 413,800 in October.<\/p>\n
Of this group, 64.4 per cent had been unemployed for less than three months, while 5.0 per cent had been unemployed for more than a year.<\/p>\n
In contrast, the inactively unemployed or those who believed no jobs were available, declined by 0.2 per cent to 104,900 from 105,100 in October.<\/p>\n
Mohd Uzir said the labour market is expected to remain stable and grow positively in coming months.<\/p>\n
Key growth areas included human health, social work, wholesale and retail trade, and accommodation and food services.<\/p>\n
Growth was also recorded in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, and mining and quarrying.<\/p>\n
Mohd Uzir cited emerging job opportunities in strategic sectors and ongoing reskilling initiatives as supporting factors.<\/p>\n
\u201cTherefore, Malaysia\u2019s labour market is forecast to remain competitive, inclusive and resilient in addressing global challenges,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Malaysia’s currency has also shown signs of strengthening.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On Jan 9, the ringgit strengthened against the Singapore dollar to about RM3.16 (US$0.77), compared to about RM3.29 on the same date last year, according to media platform Bernama.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In December 2025, the ringgit reached its strongest level against the US dollar in more than four years.<\/p>\n
The ringgit rose 0.5 per cent versus the greenback to 4.0860 on Dec 12, the highest since May 2021. With a gain of over 9 per cent against the US dollar to date in 2025, it was Asia\u2019s best-performing currency in 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysia saw its lowest unemployment rate in 11 years last November, reaching 2.9 per cent, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405722,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,99,5693,164,935,24754,4847],"class_list":["post-405721","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-economics","tag-economy","tag-malaysia","tag-ringgit","tag-unemployment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}