According to the polling company’s latest data, 10.7 per cent of Australians are unemployed.
The official number from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is 3.5 per cent.
And while the ABS said the unemployment rate was flat last month, Roy Morgan’s survey showed a substantial rise of 223,000 people in January.
That figure would place the unemployment rate at its highest level since March 2021.
Another 9.5 per cent of Australians were underemployed, according to Roy Morgan, also substantially higher than ABS estimates.
The rise in both unemployment and underemployment is attributed partly to the end of the Christmas retailing season.
The substantial discrepancy in numbers comes down to how both data-gathering agencies define unemployment.
Roy Morgan counts an unemployed person as anyone over 14 who is looking for work, no matter when.
The ABS classifies somebody as employed if they have worked for at least an hour in a week, even if it means working without pay in a family business or farm.
Roy Morgan interviews around 4000 people each month to collate their estimates of the unemployment rate.
In more bad news for the economy, ANZ-Roy Morgan’s Consumer Confidence Index showed the largest weekly drop following an RBA meeting since early June last year.
The consumer confidence drop came after the Reserve Bank lifted rates another 0.25 basis points, putting it at its highest rate since 2012.
Less than 20 per cent of Australians say their families are better off financially than this time last year.
Close to half say they are worse off.
Despite this, business confidence has had the biggest January jump since 2010, according to Roy Morgan.
