SEEK Employment Dashboard, August 2025
NOTE: The commentary, figures and tables in this report refer to trend series data. See note 1 at bottom for more information.
*Applications per job ad are recorded with a one-month lag. Data shown in this report refers to July data.
National Insights:
Job ads have risen for four consecutive months, increasing 0.8% m/m in August.
Applications per job ad rose 0.7% m/m and are now the highest on record.
State and Territory Insights:
The Australian Capital Territory was the only state or territory to record a m/m decline in August, dropping 0.1%
Growth in Hospitality & Tourism in Victoria and New South Wales contributed to an overall rise in ad volumes in these two states.
Industry Insights:
Demand for Community Services & Development workers continues to rise, up 2.4% m/m and 4.1% y/y.
Trades & Services demand has been on the rise since April, making this the longest period of growth for the industry since early 2022.
SEEK Senior Economist, Dr Blair Chapman says:
“August is traditionally the month where job ads peak in Australia, as businesses get into the swing of the new financial year and ramp up hiring activity. Even after adjusting for these seasonal shifts, ad volumes rose 0.8% m/m.
“We also start to see more businesses step up their seasonal hiring activity at this time, ahead of the busy Christmas and summer period. This appears to be the case in Victoria and New South Wales, with Hospitality & Tourism ad volumes jumping notably in August.
“Demand for workers in Employment Services and Aged & Disability Support is driving ongoing demand within the Community Services & Development industry, which has seen the fastest growth this month and this year.”
National Trends
Ad volumes rose 0.8% nationally m/m, marking the fourth consecutive month of rises. Volumes are now down just 2.8% y/y, which is the smallest annual decline recorded since November 2022.
Growth has been stronger outside of the city centres, up 1.0%, compared with 0.7% in the major metro regions.
Applications per job ad rose 0.7% m/m and are at the highest level in SEEK’s history.
Figure 1: National SEEK job ad percentage change m/m (August 2024 to August 2025)
State and Territory Trends
Mirroring July activity, all states and the Northern Territory recorded monthly growth in August. A 1.6% rise in Victoria led the rest of the country, due mainly to a jump in Hospitality & Tourism roles (5.7%), and a rise in Trades & Services (2.2%).
Similarly, rising demand for Hospitality & Tourism (3.6%) and Trades & Services (2.3%) workers in New South Wales led to the state recording a third consecutive month of job ad growth.
The Australian Capital Territory was the only region to fall m/m, down just 0.1%. The territory has recorded falling ad volumes for over three years, with its major hiring industries significantly down y/y: Government & Defence (-26.4%), Information & Communication Technology (-19.1%) and Healthcare & Medical (-16.8%).
South Australia has recorded the most sustained growth over the past 12 months, making it the only state or territory to record annual growth in ad volumes, up 4.2% y/y.
Figure 2: State and territory job ad growth/decline comparing i) August 2025 to July 2025 (m/m) and ii) August 2025 to August 2024 (y/y).
Industry Trends
Demand for workers in Community Services & Development has risen significantly over recent months, and grew 2.4% from July to August, the largest monthly increase. Ad volumes are over 50% higher compared to pre-COVID demonstrating the rising demand for workers within the care and support services.
Hospitality & Tourism has also experienced steady growth over the past six months, up 7.6% since February, and was the second highest growth industry m/m in August (2.0%). As an industry where demand is severely impacted by external and economic factors, this prolonged period of job ad rises has not been seen since the post-COVID recovery period.
Aside from Professional Services, all sectors are now growing m/m and q/q. The Construction sector has increased the fastest, rising 1.3% m/m, with monthly rises in Trades & Services (1.4%), Construction (1.8%) and Engineering (0.4%) all contributing.
Most industries within Professional Services, such as Information & Communication Technology, Accounting and Insurance & Superannuation, declined m/m and have done so for the past quarter, leading to an overall drop for the sector.
A growing number of industries are recording annual job ad rises, including Farming, Animals & Conservation (7.4%), Hospitality & Tourism (3.6%) and Construction (3.6%) among others.
Table 1: Sector growth/ decline comparing August 2025 to July 2025 (m/m) and the quarter to August to the quarter to May (q/q).
Figure 4: National SEEK job ad percentage change by industry (August 2025 vs July 2025) – Ordered by job ad volume
The full data for this report can be found here.
About the SEEK Employment Report
The SEEK Employment Report is Australia’s leading employment index and provides a comprehensive overview of the Australian Employment Marketplace. The report includes the SEEK Employment Index (SEI) which measures only new job ads posted within the reported month to provide a clean measure of demand for labour across all classifications.
Notes:
(1) From August 2025, all SEEK Employment Reports will refer to the trend data series and not the seasonally adjusted data series. The trend data series applies a weighted moving average to the seasonal adjusted figures (using a 13-term Henderson moving average) to smooth out short-term fluctuations and noise. The trend data help identify the longer-term direction by filtering out both seasonal effects and short-term volatility.
(2) The SEI may differ to the job ad count on SEEK’s website due to a number of factors including a) the trend adjustments applied to the SEI; b) the exclusion of duplicated job ads from the SEI; and c) the exclusion of aggregated ads from the SEI.
(3) From October 2025 onwards, aggregated ads will be included in the SEI to better reflect the full range of ad sources on SEEK (back dated to their inception, March 2022). Aggregated ads are re-posted by SEEK from other sources and are a small portion of SEEK’s ANZ job volumes.
(4) Caution is recommended when interpreting trend estimates during the COVID period as large month-to-month changes in variables generated multiple trend breaks.
(5) The applications per ad index contains a series break at Jan 2016 when the calculation of this series changed from using gross variables (inclusive of all SEEK job listings) to net variables (removing duplicate job listings).
This change has a negligible impact on recent data points, but caution is recommended when interpreting data immediately following the series break, and particularly in 2016 where growth rates have not been adjusted for the series break.
Disclaimer: The Data should be viewed and regarded as standalone information and should not be aggregated with any other information whether such information has been previously provided by SEEK Limited, ("SEEK"). The Data is given in summary form and whilst care has been taken in its preparation, SEEK makes no representations whatsoever about its completeness or accuracy. SEEK expressly bears no responsibility or liability for any reliance placed by you on the Data, or from the use of the Data by you. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately.