A series developed by the Observatory measures the formality of all employed workers since 2016, not just salaried workers.

The UNR Economic and Social Observatory published a report that measures labor informality across the entire universe of employed workers in Argentina—salaried workers, self-employed workers, employers, and family workers—over 36 quarters, between the end of 2016 and the end of 2025. It is the first series that allows this phenomenon to be tracked continuously for all employed people.

Until very recently, the available statistics measured formal employment based on pension contribution declarations. This criterion works for salaried workers, but it leaves out the self-employed and employers: almost a third of the country's employed population remained unclassified. Since the fourth quarter of 2024, INDEC (the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses) has begun measuring informal employment for all workers, and this series extends that measurement back in time.

Why informal employment seemed higher before

The traditional contribution-based measurement is between 7 and 12 percentage points higher than the new series. The difference does not reflect a real change: 97,9% is explained by the change in the population, that is, by including workers who were not previously classified. Comparing the levels of one and the other without clarifying this leads to erroneous conclusions.

Graph of the evolution of the rate of informal employment in Argentina between 2016 and 2026
Evolution of informal employment for all employed persons, Q4 2016 to Q1 2026. Source: Economic and Social Observatory (UNR) on EPH-INDEC.

In the first quarter of 2026, informality among employed individuals in Argentina reached 44,2%. The driving force behind this is self-employment: its informality rate (65,1%) is almost double that of salaried workers (37,9%). Furthermore, self-employment has been gaining ground within total employment, rising from 21,1% to 24,5% between 2017 and 2025, which alone increases aggregate informality by approximately 1,3 percentage points.

Two trends that only this series allows us to see

The long-term data series reveals processes that were previously hidden. On the one hand, self-employment is becoming more feminized: women's participation rose from 34,1% to 41,5%. On the other hand, the generational gap is widening: formal employment among 19- to 25-year-olds fell from 43,5% to 34,8% in a decade, a much steeper decline than that of middle-aged adults.

The report also shows the relationship between informality and living conditions: an informal worker is 3,4 times more likely to live in a poor household than a formal worker (34,3% versus 10,0%). It also includes a chapter dedicated to the Greater Rosario metropolitan area and a panel with the 32 urban areas surveyed.

The report and data series are published in open access, so that anyone can reuse, review, and discuss them.

What is the difference between this series and traditional measurement?

The traditional system only classifies salaried workers based on their declared pension contributions. This new system covers all employed individuals, including the self-employed and employers, and therefore yields lower levels: it measures a different, broader population.

Since when does INDEC measure the informality of all employed people?

From the fourth quarter of 2024, based on the redesign of the Permanent Household Survey. The Observatory's series extends that measurement back to the last quarter of 2016.

Can the levels of the two measurements be compared?

 Not without clarifying this. Formal employment, measured only among salaried workers, is structurally higher than when measured among all employed individuals. The gap between the two is 7 to 12 percentage points, and this difference is almost entirely due to mechanical factors.

Where can I download the data?

The report is in the institutional repository RepHip and the data series in the UNR Dataverse, both of which are open access.

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