Job-finding rate 18.9%, well below pre-pandemic norm

Fewer than one in five unemployed Canadians found a job in October, a rate well below what the country saw before the pandemic, Statistics Canada data released Friday show.

The agency’s Labour Force Survey put the job-finding rate at 18.9 per cent: of the people who were unemployed in September, that share had work in October. A year earlier the rate was 19.8 per cent. Over the same months from 2017 to 2019, it averaged 24.6 per cent. The figures are not seasonally adjusted.

The headline numbers on Friday were that employment was little changed, down 4,700, and that the unemployment rate rose 0.2 percentage points to 6.7 per cent. Our report on the provincial results covers where jobs were lost. The job-finding rate shows something the headline does not: how hard it is for someone who has lost work to get back in.

The gap between 18.9 per cent and the 2017-to-2019 average is 5.7 percentage points. With about 1.5 million people unemployed in October, a rough calculation by Canada News Media suggests that if the pre-pandemic rate held today, on the order of 85,000 more unemployed people a month would be landing jobs. That is an illustration, not a Statistics Canada estimate, because the two periods differ in size and make-up and the agency does not publish that figure.

Layoffs do not explain it. The layoff rate in October was 0.7 per cent, virtually unchanged from 0.6 per cent a year earlier, Statistics Canada said. People are not being let go in unusual numbers. They are taking longer to find the next job.

That shows up in long-term unemployment. Of the 1.5 million people unemployed in October, 23.7 per cent, or roughly 355,000 by our calculation, had been looking continuously for 27 weeks or more. A year earlier the share was 21.5 per cent. The 2017-to-2019 average was 17.2 per cent.

The share is highest among older workers. For people 55 and older, 32.7 per cent of the unemployed were in long-term unemployment in October, up from 27.9 per cent a year earlier. For core-aged workers, 25.3 per cent, up from 23.3 per cent. Youth had the lowest share at 15.2 per cent, little changed from 14.4 per cent, although their unemployment rate rose 0.7 percentage points in the month to 13.7 per cent.

The pattern is different from the one in the youth data. Young people are more likely to be newly searching and to move in and out of work quickly, which keeps their long-term share low even as their unemployment rate is the highest of any age group. Older workers who lose a job are less likely to find the next one soon, and the survey’s figures show that. Our earlier look at young graduates’ full-time job rate found a different kind of squeeze at the other end of the age range.

For an ordinary household, the numbers mean a longer gap between paycheques after a job loss, and a greater chance that employment insurance benefits run out before a new job starts. Statistics Canada did not report on benefit exhaustion in the survey, and the figures here do not show it directly.

The weakness is not spread evenly across the economy. Private sector employment fell by 53,000 in October, the first decline since February, while public sector employment rose by 50,000. The public sector is still down 70,000 from a year earlier, as we reported on Oct. 26. Wholesale and retail trade lost 29,000 jobs in October and is down 113,000 from a year ago.

Average hourly wages rose 2.2 per cent from a year earlier to $37.89, following 2.3 per cent growth in September, the agency said. The August payroll data we covered showed a similar loss of momentum.

The unemployment rate is still 0.2 percentage points lower than a year ago and below the recent peak of 6.9 per cent in April. The job-finding rate and the rising share of long-term jobless suggest the lower year-over-year headline rate may owe more to people leaving the labour force or staying in jobs than to easier hiring, although the survey data alone do not establish that.

How we did this: we used Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey release for October 2026, published Nov. 6, 2026 in The Daily, and its table 14-10-0287-01. The job-finding rate, layoff rate and long-term unemployment shares are the agency’s published figures. The 85,000 and 355,000 numbers are our own approximate calculations from those figures and the 1.5 million unemployed, and are not published by Statistics Canada. We did not request comment from any department for this story.

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