The total number of employed people in the Dominican economy (including both formal and informal) stood at 5,117,548 workers, in the first quarter of 2025, meaning a net increase of 176,581 new employed people compared to the January-March period of 2024.
This is the highest number of employed people recorded in the last six years, according to the preliminary results of the National Continuous Labor Force Survey (ENCFT), published by the Central Bank, corresponding to the January-March 2025 quarter.
The report indicates that, as a result of this growth, the employment rate defined as the ratio between the total number of employed people and the working-age population stood at 62.8% in January-March 2025, thus reaching the highest level in the entire indicator series, and exceeding the rate recorded in the first quarter of 2024 by 1.2 percentage points.
Formal jobs
The monetary policy regulator details that, when analyzing the year-on-year increase of 176,581 workers from the perspective of access to social security benefits through employment, it is observed that the number of formal employed increased by 188,658 people, while the informal ones decreased by 12,077 people. “Thus, the informality rate was at the lowest point in the series, registering 53.4% of the employed population in January-March 2025,” the report highlights.
With regard to the evolution of unemployment and other indicators of the underutilization of the labor force, it is noteworthy to see that these remain around their minimum values within the historical series.
In particular, the open unemployment rate, i.e. the percentage of the unemployed who are actively looking for work as a portion of the labor force, fell from 5.1% in January-March 2024 to 4.9% in the same quarter of 2025.
Source:
