Mexico recorded 23,088,353 jobs registered with its social security institute at the end of October, an increase of 161,077 during the month.
The Mexican Social Security Institute, known as IMSS, said the October total was the highest in its records. President Claudia Sheinbaum had announced the figure on 9 November before the institute issued its detailed report.
There is an important qualification to the record claim. In July 2025, the institute reported a higher headline total that included an initial wave of registrations under a pilot for digital-platform workers. A subsequent report distinguished a broader count of affiliations from the narrower count of jobs. The earlier and latest headline totals therefore need care in comparison.
The new figures measure positions registered with IMSS, not every job in Mexico or a count of individual workers. A person can have more than one registered position, and the measure does not capture the whole informal labour market.
How registrations changed
The October increase was equivalent to 0.7 per cent over the month. The institute reported 571,277 additional registered positions in the first ten months of 2026, and an increase of 299,180, or 1.3 per cent, compared with a year earlier.
The monthly gain was larger than the 128,803 positions added in September, when the registered total stood at 22,927,276. It was smaller than the 217,491 positions added in October 2025. Comparing monthly changes with the same month a year earlier offers a different perspective from comparing a month with the one immediately before it.
Permanent positions accounted for 86.8 per cent of the October total, with temporary positions making up the remaining 13.2 per cent. The institute counted 20,043,824 permanent positions.
Across sectors, transport and communications recorded annual growth of 6.7 per cent in registered positions, extractive industries grew by 5.5 per cent and construction by 3.4 per cent. These are changes within each sector, rather than the sectors’ shares of all registered jobs.
Among Mexico’s states, the institute said Chiapas, Oaxaca and Hidalgo each recorded annual growth above 4.5 per cent. The national total does not imply that every state or industry experienced the same pattern.
Platform work and coverage
The report also gives a picture of workers covered by the reform for digital platforms. IMSS said 1,748,740 people benefited from the reform at the end of October. Of those, 229,249 had passed the monthly net-income threshold and were registered by 18 platforms as positions with access to the institute’s full set of insurance schemes.
People covered by the reform who did not pass the threshold remained covered for occupational risks while performing platform work, according to the institute. The broader number of people benefiting from the reform and the number registered as positions describe different measures; they should not simply be added together.
The distinction is relevant to the historical comparison. In its July 2025 report, IMSS put the headline total at 23,591,691 and said the increase had been driven by the start of the platform-worker pilot. By October 2025, its monthly report separately identified employer-linked affiliations, including platform-reform beneficiaries, and registered jobs. The figures in the earlier headline and the latest jobs total are not a straightforward like-for-like comparison.
A wider labour-market picture
The institute put the average daily base wage used for social-security contributions among registered positions at 664.7 pesos at the end of October. That was 42.7 pesos higher than a year earlier in nominal terms. A nominal increase does not by itself show how much workers’ purchasing power changed after inflation.
IMSS also recorded 1,008,887 employer registrations, up by 127 over the month but down 2.9 per cent over the year. It cautioned that these are administrative registrations rather than a direct count of businesses. Changes can reflect processes such as updating or removing duplicate records, and a decline does not automatically mean that businesses have closed.
A separate household survey offers a broader view. Mexico’s national statistics institute estimated that 54.3 per cent of people in work were in informal employment in September. That survey and the IMSS register use different methods, cover different populations and refer here to different months.
The October registrations show growth in the part of the labour market captured by the social-security system. They do not establish what happened to total employment across the country, nor do they resolve how many people working informally gained secure jobs.
