The Eastern Cape has the highest unemployment rate of all South Africa's provinces at 47.5%, 13.9 percentage points above the national rate of 33.6%. This is according to Statistics South Africa's second Quarterly Labour Force Survey for 2026.
But the province's labour story is nuanced. Between the first and second quarters of the year, the number of employed people actually grew by 13 000. The problem is that 160 000 more people entered the labour force over the same period, looking for work the province could not provide. That pushed unemployment up by 2.9 percentage points in just three months, to the second-highest quarterly rate the province has recorded since 2008, behind the Covid-19 pandemic peak in late 2020.
The picture looks different over a full year. Since the second quarter of 2025, the Eastern Cape has both gained more jobseekers and lost 116 000 jobs, pushing unemployment up by eight percentage points, the steepest annual increase of any province in the country.
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