- Private-household employment fell by 68,000, while informal-sector employment declined by 98,000 between the second and third quarters of 2026.
- Formal employment increased by 268,000, but official unemployment still edged up to 33.7%.
South Africa added jobs between July and September, but workers employed in private homes faced a much tougher quarter.
Employment in private households fell by an estimated 68,000 compared with April to June, Statistics South Africa reported in its Quarterly Labour Force Survey, released on Tuesday, 10 November.
The category covers people employed directly by households, including domestic workers, gardeners, cooks and childminders. It does not mean everyone who works from home, and independently run cleaning or gardening businesses are classified separately.
The decline left about one million people employed in the household sector.
Informal employment also fell by 98,000 to about 3.5 million. Formal employment moved in the opposite direction, increasing by 268,000 to 12.3 million.
Finance recorded the biggest industry gain, adding 111,000 workers. Manufacturing added 33,000 and mining 31,000.
Across the economy, employment increased by 101,000 to 16.8 million. But the number of unemployed people also rose, by 97,000 to 8.6 million.
That pushed official unemployment from 33.6% to 33.7%. More people entered the labour force than found work.
For families dependent on domestic work, the national improvement offers little comfort if their own source of income disappears.
Scrolla.Africa reported in April that Mthatha live-in helper Nompumelelo Zicina earned R3,500 a month and did not know about the new legal minimum wage.
“Most of us just want to earn an income, we don’t have the luxury of asking about UIF and all those things,” she said then.
Domestic workers are entitled to the national minimum wage of R30.23 for each ordinary hour worked, effective from 1 March 2026. Eight ordinary paid hours amount to R241.84. Monthly earnings depend on the hours worked. The new employment figures do not explain why household work declined. They cannot establish that higher wages, electricity bills or grocery costs caused employers to cut jobs.
They are also net survey estimates, rather than a count of dismissal notices. Some people may have entered household employment while others left.
What the figures establish is that fewer people were earning through work in private homes at the end of the quarter, a setback for families relying on those earnings to pay for food, rent and transport.
