It has been a tough few years to be a jobseeker. Data this week is expected to show the unemployment rate still hovering around the highest level it's been in a decade.

But fortunes have varied depending on where you are in the country, and the type of work you do.

The job market peak was reached in October 2023, when there were 2.395 million filled jobs nationwide. The trough was in October last year, when that had dropped to 2.337m.

Provisional estimates are that the number is now about 2.35m filled jobs.

Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub said from the peak of the market to the bottom, there were just under 60,000 jobs lost but since then, 17,575 have been recovered, leaving the country still 40,924 jobs short compared to the busiest time in the labour market.

Here are some of the winners and losers of the labour market both since the peak, and over the past five years.

Sectors

Since the job market peaked in October 2023, the biggest drop in jobs in percentage terms has been felt in the information media and telecommunications sector, down 11.2 percent or 3761 jobs.

Over five years, smoothing out the post-Covid high, job numbers in that sector are still down 5.6 percent.

Construction has also had a sharp fall from the peak, having lost 8.4 percent of its jobs, or 17,249, but the number is flat compared to 2021.

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Some sectors have continued to grow since the peak, such as arts and recreation services, which is up 6.1 percent from 2023 and 16.2 percent over five years. Of this sector, the largest proportion of jobs is in sports and physical recreation, such as people working in gyms. Their numbers have lifted from 22,700 in 2023 to 24,400 last year. There has also been significant growth in businesses. Personal health and fitness training business numbers increased 112.5 percent between 2019 and 2025.

Healthcare and social assistance jobs have also increased since the job market peak, up 5.4 percent since 2023 and 12.7 percent from five years ago.

Education and training is up 4.4 percent from the peak and 6.6 percent over five years.

Eaqub said, on a per population basis, there had not yet been any real recovery. Data would show there were more hours being worked, he said, but the recovery in jobs so far had only kept pace with population growth. "It's not a high-quality recovery yet."

Construction's increase was the largest in number terms, followed by manufacturing down 11,822.

Westpac chief economist Kelly Eckhold said the strongest parts of the labour market were those that were tied to underlying population growth.

"It's the expansion of certain elements of public service-related industries as well, particularly in health, education… those sectors have grown a lot because the population has grown in the last five years. They've continued to grow, albeit at a slower rate since 2023, because that was when the population growth peaked… there's quite a few industries that are a lot more government or public sector dominated, and they just tend to not be really influenced by the cycle so much."

In contrast, sectors such as construction were much more closely tied to the fortunes of the wider economy.

Infometrics principal economist Brad Olsen said the October 2023 peak was exaggerated by the election, with a burst of short-term filled jobs in public administration. "Excluding that boost, jobs activity likely peaked around March 2024."

"The large increases in healthcare, public administration, and education and training reflect a growing population and of course one of the largest health-related events in memory.

"Further hiring in education is also likely due to retraining of people throughout the pandemic, and then as the unemployment rate increased, with more people looking at training options to re- or up-skill."

He said construction had gone through a significant period of change.

"At one point, residential construction intentions were the highest in half a century, fuelled by rocketing house prices and low interest rates, and the sector scaled up to meet that high demand. But when interest rates rose and house prices and activity dropped, construction activity pulled back too, having upped capacity to meet peak needs that just didn't, and were never going to, persist."

He said both admin and information media and telecoms jobs had been holding up for a while until the downturn became more pronounced.

By age

There are now 61,009 fewer jobs held by people aged under 30 than there were at the peak, and 43,726 fewer than five years ago.

The number of people over 55 working has increased 9.7 percent over five years and the number aged 30 to 54 has increased 9.1 percent.

"It's definitely the younger people who had quite a big increase, particularly the 15 to 19-year-olds had a big increase in jobs or employment during that really tight labour market period, when there was a hiring frenzy during the Covid years, those numbers were unusually high.

"The cost of living particularly for necessities skyrocketed so a lot of young people, kids at school, started to work and that's kind of fallen off and hasn't really recovered."

Ministry of Social Development data shows the biggest increase in main benefit recipient numbers has been in the 25 to 39 age group where there are now 20 percent more people receiving a benefit than there were in June 2021.

Eckhold said it was a "no hire, no fire" market.

"We haven't necessarily seen enormous amounts of layoffs in aggregate across the economy, but it has become quite hard to find a job. And that's particularly impacted the younger age group, because they've got less skills and experience, so it's always just a bit harder."

Region

Canterbury has had some of the strongest job growth. Its job numbers are up 1.4 percent compared to the peak and 8.9 percent over five years.

Auckland is down 2.7 percent form the peak and 5.1 percent up over five years.

Wellington is down 3.8 percent from the peak and 0.3 percent up over five years.

Gisborne has been hard hit, down 4.2 percent from the peak and 1.5 percent over five years.

Wellington and Auckland have had the largest percentage increase in benefit recipients between June 2021 and June 2026, in percentage terms.

Eckhold said he expected to see a small increase in the unemployment rate this week and his current forecast was for that to be the peak.

"I will say though, we'll be doing a whole new set of forecasts this month. When we put in place our previous forecasts, it was in the context of a better outlook, because it looked like energy prices were quite a lot lower. It looked like we're going to have a period of more stability, and that seems to have tended not to be the case now that we've got a little bit further on. So, it may be optimistic to expect that the unemployment rate will be peaking now. Perhaps we might have to wait a bit longer for that."

He said the job market would be the last thing to pick up.

"GDP has actually been picking up now for three or four quarters or so. It looks like we had an interruption to growth in Q2, but three quarters before that we'd had some decent growth. But there's always a lag between when you actually see growth occur and then when hiring really picks up.

"Probably at the start of the year, we would have expected that hiring growth to really be starting to hit its straps now, in the second half of the year. But I think the Iran war has really just pushed that back."