In a sign of the brutal impact of the Reserve Bank’s three interest rate rises, more than 1 million Australians worked multiple jobs in the June quarter for the first time. When cost of living pressures rise, one of the more dramatic impacts we see in the economy is more people needing to work more than one job to make ends meet.
Fri 4 Sep 2026 12.59 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/Joel Carrett
As a long-term critic of the Productivity Commission, and someone who has called for their abolition, even I think the Prime Minister’s recent attack on the government-funded think tank was unfair and inaccurate.
On Monday, Australian Energy Producers (AEP) - the lobby group representing the foreign owned gas giants that export 80% of Australia’s gas - welcomed the Coalition’s announcement to help them export even more of Australia’s finite gas resources by cutting environmental protections and increasing subsidies.
In a sign of the brutal impact of the Reserve Bank’s three interest rate rises, more than 1 million Australians worked multiple jobs in the June quarter for the first time.
When cost of living pressures rise, one of the more dramatic impacts we see in the economy is more people needing to work more than one job to make ends meet. This was very much the case in 2022 and 2023, when rising prices saw an almost 2-year run of record numbers of people working multiple jobs.
But now those records have been smashed.
In the June quarter, 1.049m people worked multiple jobs – up 7% on the number in the March quarter:
This highlights just how savagely the three interest rate rises in the first 5 months of this year have hurt Australian households off the back of the cost rises due to the Iran War combined with slowing wage growth.
And while nominal figures can be misleading – after all, the population grows each quarter – even as a share of all employed, a new record was set.
In June, 6.9% of all people with a job were working more than one of them:
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In June, nearly half (47%) of the 110,000 new jobs were someone’s secondary job. That is the second-highest share of new jobs in the past decade that were accounted for by secondary jobs
The quarterly labour account figures, unlike the more well-known monthly labour force figures, count jobs as well and employed.
What this shows is that while in the June quarter the number of jobs rose by 110,000, the number of people employed rose just 59,210.
In the June quarter as well, the number of unemployed per vacancy reached its highest level for 5 years.
While the current level of 2.0 unemployed per vacancy is historically low, it highlights yet again that the increased interest rates have had an impact and the Australia economy does not need to be slowed by further rate rises.
When a record share of workers need more than one job to pay the bills, surely that is a sign that Australians are already hurting enough.
