The unemployment rate in France rose 0.2 percentage points in the second quarter of the year, on a quarter-on-quarter basis, new data from Insee, the French statistics office, has revealed.
According to the data, the unemployment rate stood at 8.3% for the quarter, which was a 0.7-percentage-point increase on the same period the previous year.
The number of unemployed people increased by 62,000 during the quarter to 2.7 million, its highest level since the third quarter of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the data showed. However, it remained 2.2 percentage points below the peak recorded in the second quarter of 2015.
Unemployment rate
As the data showed, the unemployment rate increased across all main age groups on a quarter-on-quarter basis. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, the rate rose by 0.4 points to 21.6%, while unemployment among those aged 25 to 49 increased by 0.2 points to 7.5%. For people aged 50 and over, it rose by 0.3 points to 5.5%.
On a year-on-year basis, meanwhile, youth unemployment increased by 2.5 percentage points, compared with increases of 0.5 points among 25- to 49-year-olds and 0.7 points among those aged 50 and over.
Women’s unemployment rose by 0.4 points during the quarter to 8.2%, while men’s unemployment remained unchanged at 8.5%. Both increased by 0.8 points compared with a year earlier.
‘Q2 2026 is also the sixth quarter in which the French full employment Act (Loi pour le plein emploi) was implemented: over those six quarters, RSA recipients and young people aged 15 to 29 registered with France Travail contributed to almost the half of the rise in the unemployment rate,’ Insee noted.
Long-term unemployment
Insee’s data also showed that long-term unemployment has increased in France. The number of people who had been unemployed and seeking work for at least one year reached 671,000, up 36,000 from the previous quarter and 116,000 from a year earlier.
The long-term unemployment rate rose to 2.1%, its highest level since the second quarter of 2022. Read more here.
