Australia’s jobs boom is increasingly a care-and-government story

Australia has created a large number of jobs since 2022, but the composition of that growth is unusually concentrated.

Benchmark analysis of the ABS Labour Account Australia, June 2026, released on 4 September, shows the number of seasonally adjusted main jobs increased by about 1.29 million between June 2022 and June 2026, from 13.87 million to 15.16 million. The ABS defines a main job as the job in which an employed person usually works the most hours; each person can have only one.

Of those additional main jobs, around 412,000 were in Health Care and Social Assistance, 205,000 in Education and Training and 72,000 in Public Administration and Safety.

Combined, those three industries generated about 689,000 jobs — 53.4 per cent of the entire net increase in Australian main jobs since June 2022.

Health Care and Social Assistance alone accounted for almost one-third.

This does not mean 53 per cent of new jobs were government jobs. Health and education include substantial private-sector employment. But both industries are heavily influenced by taxpayer funding and government programs, while Public Administration and Safety is directly government-based.

The longer-term transformation is even more striking. In 1994, manufacturing accounted for around 13.8 per cent of Australian main jobs, compared with 8.4 per cent for health and social assistance. Today those positions have reversed: manufacturing represents about 5.9 per cent, while health and social assistance accounts for 15.7 per cent.

Australia’s employment story is therefore not simply about how many jobs are being created. Increasingly, it is also about which parts of the economy are creating them — and how dependent that growth is on government-supported activity.

Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Account Australia, June 2026, seasonally adjusted industry time series. The release reports 15.159 million main jobs in June 2026.