Unemployment in Spain has been chaining months of good news. In April, the number of unemployed fell to 2,357,044 people, falling below 2.4 million for the first time since June 2008. The story, seen from afar, is that of a labor market that has finally left its worst unemployment figures behind. However, that story has a blind spot.
When the data is broken down by age, the initial optimism gives way to reality: the labor market is improving, yes, but not for everyone equally. The workers over 45 years they continue to fall behind, and the latest data of the State Public Employment Service (SEPE) confirm it.
Senior unemployment is close to 60% of the total. Of the slightly less than 2.35 million unemployed counted in April 2026 in Spain, 1,376,550 unemployed were 45 years old. This represents 58.4% of all registered unemployment. In other words, six out of ten unemployed They are over 45 years old. The bad news doesn’t end there. Within this group of people over 45, one in three unemployed people is already over 50 years old.
To put into perspective what that percentage implies, we must compare it with what happened in the same month among those under 25 years of age. Youth unemployment has improved its percentages with a drop of 10.2%, with 19,284 fewer young people on the SEPE lists. If we return to the data for those over 45 years of age, we find that only 19,990 people in this age group they found a job, but in this case the decrease has only meant a drop of 1.43%.
That is, given the progressive aging of the active population in Spain, those over 45 years of age are the largest group, so although the number of people who have found employment are very similar, the weight as a whole is very different.
Less unemployed, but more chronic unemployment. At the end of the first quarter of 2026, the segment of those over 55 years of age was close to 4.93 million employed people. This represents 22% of all workers in the country, with 242,500 more people than a year before. These are figures that reflect that, on the one hand, the active population is increasingly older and, on the other hand, he is retiring later and remains in the labor market for longer.
The second bad news for those over 45 years of age is that those who lose their job at that age have enormous difficulties in recovering it. In March 2026, those under 25 years of age signed 308,094 contracts, compared to the 367,204 signed by the group over 45, which doubles the percentage of the active population in number. That leaves us with one conclusion: senior hiring is proportionally tiny.
He Labor Market Report for People over 45 years of age 2026 prepared by the SEPE, indicates that this group will exceed 11 million employed during 2025, more than 50% of the total number of workers. Even so, this massive presence in existing employment does not translate into the same rate of access to new opportunities. This is an indicator that the barriers to the reintegration of those over 45 into the labor market continue to be insurmountable. once you lose your job. Proof of this is that 53% of the 755,500 unemployed people over 50 have been looking for a job for more than a year without finding it.
Youth unemployment breaks its own record. The scenario for those under 25 years of age is diametrically opposite. unemployment among those under 25 years of age It closed April 2026 at 24.53% with a total of 169,693 people, the lowest figure in the entire SEPE historical series.
In year-on-year terms, it represents a drop of 14.2% compared to April of last year, when there were 197,674 young people unemployed. A decade ago, in 2015, the youth unemployment rate in Spain stood at 44.4%. This sustained decline has no equivalent in any other age group, which makes youth employment one of the great successes of the Spanish labor market in recent years.
In aging it is a determining factor. As the data show, age defines large differences in the impact of unemployment between the different segments of the active population, but this differentiation also means that unemployment punishes some communities more than others, with a special impact on emptied Spainwhere young people have moved to the large industrial hubs.
By province, Zamora stands out strikingly because more than 62% of its unemployed are over 45 years old. Pontevedra and La Coruña also present very aging unemployment structures.
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Image | Unsplash (Hasan Mrad)
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