Graduate Unemployment Runs Well Above the National Rate, Gallup Analysis Finds

Pakistani graduates are more likely to be unemployed than the workforce as a whole, according to an analysis of the government's own labour data. Gallup Pakistan's Digital Analytics unit, working from microdata in the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics' Labour Force Survey 2024-25, found unemployment among graduates running at 18.3% — well above the 14.7% national rate across all education levels combined, published September 24, 2026.

A credential that doesn't guarantee a job

The headline gap already complicates a common assumption — that finishing a degree improves your odds in the job market more reliably than it does in Pakistan's case, at least in the near term. The gap is starkest at the start of a graduate's working life. Among those aged 20 to 24, unemployment reaches 32.8%, meaning close to one in three recent graduates in that age band who are actively in the labour force cannot find work. The rate eases only gradually as graduates age: it falls to 24.8% for those 25 to 29, 15.3% for 30 to 34, and down to 5.3% by ages 40 to 44 — a pattern consistent with graduates eventually finding placement, but only after a prolonged and difficult entry into the workforce.

The gender gap is wider than the headline number suggests

Splitting the youngest bracket by gender shows the burden falls unevenly. Among graduates aged 20 to 24, 42.3% of women in the labour force are unemployed, compared with 26.1% of men — a gap of roughly 16 percentage points. It does not close with age either: among 25-to-29-year-old graduates, 45.2% of women are unemployed against 14.9% of men, meaning the gender gap actually widens in the second age bracket the survey examined, even as men's unemployment nearly halves. Labour economists studying similar patterns elsewhere point to a mix of factors — employer hiring bias, fewer women remaining in or re-entering the labour force after early setbacks, and occupational segregation into fields with fewer openings — though the Labour Force Survey itself does not isolate a single cause.

Why this sits awkwardly next to the out-of-school-children problem

The finding sits alongside a separate, longer-running education story this site has covered: Pakistan's out-of-school children crisis, where the debate centers on getting tens of millions of children into classrooms at all. Gallup's numbers describe the opposite end of the pipeline — young people who completed the credential system is built around, only to find the labour market cannot readily absorb them. Taken together, the two data points suggest Pakistan's education-to-employment pipeline has weak points at both ends: getting children in, and getting graduates out into jobs that use what they learned.

The economic backdrop graduates are entering

Graduates are also job-hunting into a difficult macro environment. Pakistan's cost-of-living pressures have squeezed formal-sector hiring budgets at the same time universities continue producing more graduates than the market has historically absorbed, a mismatch labour economists have flagged for years without a coordinated policy response. It is also one of the structural pressures behind sustained emigration among the educated, which shows up elsewhere in Pakistan's economic data — including the remittance flows that have become a fiscal lifeline even as they represent, in human terms, a loss of exactly the skilled workers this survey shows struggling to find work at home.

What the numbers don't tell us

The Labour Force Survey measures unemployment among people actively in the labour force — it does not capture graduates who have stopped looking for work, taken jobs well below their qualification level, or left the country. Gallup's analysis, drawn from PBS microdata rather than a fresh survey, describes the scale of the mismatch without prescribing a fix; provincial education and labour departments have not yet issued a formal response to the findings as of this writing.

Build Better Pakistan's Education Desk covers education policy, enrollment data and the school-to-employment pipeline across Pakistan.