Extracting Unemployment Data from JSA PDF Dashboards

📊 Unemployment Data by Employment Region – Cleaned & Downloadable

Accessing current unemployment rates by Employment Region in Australia should be easy. But it's not.

The government doesn’t publish the data in CSV or API form. Instead, it’s buried inside PDF dashboards and Power BI tools with no export options.

---

🚧 Why SA4 and SA2 Didn’t Work

I first tried to reconstruct Employment Region data by combining official SA4 and SA2 data from ABS and DEWR. Technically, Employment Regions are built from these geographic levels.

But when I compared our merged data with the JSA dashboards, we noticed major differences. That’s when we discovered:

🔍 JSA applies a hidden “regional loading” adjustment, making their unemployment figures slightly higher or lower than the raw SA4/SA2 average.

Since the methodology and exact weightings aren’t public, reproducing official JSA numbers is impossible using only open data.

---

🧠 The Solution: Parse the PDFs

Instead of trying to reverse-engineer the secret sauce, I went straight to the official PDFs.

The good news?

Each state/territory has its own dashboard, so I only needed to download 7 files.

We then built a custom Python script to extract the following from each region section:

• ✅ Region Name
• 📅 Month
• 📈 Unemployment Rate
• 👤 Unemployed Persons
• 👥 Employed Persons
• 🔄 Participation Rate
• 👶 Youth Unemployment Rate

---

📉 Coverage & Notes

• Only 44 regions had usable data in the latest release.
• The missing ones are either very small or remote, and not included in the official dashboards.
• For most analysis, this is a reasonable coverage level.

---

📥 Download the Clean CSV

You can download the full cleaned dataset below 👇

⬇️ Download Unemployment Rate by Employment Region (May 2025)

---

🦊 Built by TH from Ozsparkhub

This data pipeline was developed using Python, pdfplumber, and custom pattern-matching logic. The result is a human-friendly CSV from government PDFs—ready for dashboards, reports, and policy analysis.

Have questions or want to use this in your own project? Just reach out 💌