SEEK Employment Dashboard, October 2025

NOTE: Changes have been made to the composition of the data used in these reports, including the inclusion of company listings. Data in this report should therefore not be compared with data in previous reports. See notes at end for more information.

*Applications per job ad are recorded with a one-month lag. Data shown in this report refers to September data.

National Insights:

• Job ad volumes declined 0.4% in October and are 2.2% down y/y.

• Applications per job ad rose 1.3% m/m.

State and Territory Insights:

• Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia were the only states or territories to see a monthly rise in job ads, increasing 0.5%, 0.2% and 0.1% respectively.

• Victoria (-0.4% m/m) and New South Wales (-0.3% m/m) both saw monthly declines.

• South Australia has seen the largest annual rise of any state or territory, recording a 3.7% y/y increase.

Industry Insights:

• Manufacturing, Transport & Logistics (1.1%) and Construction (1.0%) both saw monthly increases and are among the top industries to have grown annually, rising 7.8% y/y and 7.9% y/y respectively.

• Real Estate & Property jobs grew the fastest m/m, up 1.4%.

SEEK Senior Economist, Dr Blair Chapman says:

National Trends

Job ad volumes fell 0.4% m/m in October, including company listings. Most states and territories contributed to the overall decline, aside from Queensland, which rose 0.5% and modest gains in South Australia (0.2%) and Western Australia (0.1%). 

Applications per job ad rose continue to rise, marking over three years of uninterrupted growth, up a further 1.3% m/m in September. 

Figure 1: National SEEK job ad percentage change m/m with Company Listings included (blue bar) and excluded (pink dot).

State and Territory Trends

October was a mixed month across the states and territories. Queensland recorded the biggest monthly jump (0.5%), with South Australia (0.2%) and Western Australia (0.1%) also rising. All other states declined, with the two territories recording the swiftest falls: Australian Capital Territory (-0.9%) and Northern Territory (-0.9%).

Queensland’s rise was driven by strong contributions from Trades & Service (1.7% m/m) and Manufacturing, Transport & Logistics (1.0% m/m). 

Annual performance somewhat mimics the monthly trend, with South Australia (3.7%) and Western Australia (1.3%) recording higher job ad volumes y/y and Queensland the next nearest margin, albeit a slight decline (-0.5%). Ad volumes in New South Wales, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory continue to fall y/y, though the rate of decline is slowing. 

Figure2: State and territory job ad growth/decline comparing i) October 2025 to September 2025 (m/m) and ii) October 2025 to October 2024 (y/y). 

Industry Trends

Generally, job ad growth in October was centred around the Industrial and Construction sectors, with m/m increases in Manufacturing, Transport & Logistics (1.1%) Construction (1.0%) and Trades & Services (0.2%). These are also the industries showing the most significant annual growth in demand, rising 7.8%, 7.9% and 2.8% respectively.

Demand for workers in Professional Services industries have declined almost across the board m/m, aside from Legal (0.9%) and Human Resources (0.6%)

At 1.4%, Real Estate & Property jobs grew the fastest m/m, particularly in Queensland where they jumped 2.2% and in Victoria at 2.0%.

Retail & Consumer Products roles have been declining steadily since June and dropped a further 1.8% m/m. which had appeared to stabilise for close to a year  

Information & Communication Technology saw a decline of 0.8% m/m. The industry shows -6.7% y/y decline, confirming a sustained cooling period after pandemic-era tech hiring surge.

Figure 4: National SEEK job ad percentage change by industry (October 2025 vs September 2025) – Ordered by job ad volume.

NOTES

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.

To improve this index and continuously ensure its market accuracy, SEEK has recently implemented two main changes:

1. Reporting on trend estimates in the SEEK Employment Report rather than seasonally adjusted estimates from August 2025. Trend estimates provide a more reliable guide to the underlying direction of the data and are more suitable than either the seasonally adjusted or original estimates for business decisions. The trend estimates focus on the longer-term underlying trend and are less susceptible to short term movements. Additionally, charts have been indexed to the average of 2016 as opposed to the average of 2013.

2. The inclusion of company listings in the SEI from November 2025, beginning with this report, to better reflect the full range of ad sources on SEEK. Company listings are job ads re-posted by SEEK from other sources and are a small portion of SEEK’s AU and NZ job volumes. The below chart shows the impact of company listings on the index, which are back dated to 2016.

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; and b) the exclusion of duplicated job ads from the SEI.

Caution is recommended when interpreting trend estimates during the COVID period as large month-to-month changes in variables generated multiple trend breaks.

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 ads) to net variables (removing duplicate job ads). 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.