South Africa's unemployment rate increased to 27.5 percent in the third quarter of 2018, an increase of 0.3 percentage point over the second quarter, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) announced on Tuesday.

Unemployment among South Africans between the ages of 15 and 24 was even higher, standing at 52.8 percent in the third quarter of this year, compared with 52.4 percent in the second quarter, Stats SA said in its Quarterly Labor Force Survey.

While there were 446,000 people employed in the mining industry in the third quarter of 2017, this had fallen to 406,000 in the most recent data, a decrease of 8.9 percent.

On an annual quarter-on-quarter basis, jobs in the construction industry increased by over 10 percent, from 1.36 million, to 1.5 million.

The survey also showed that the South African working-age population increased by 153,000 or 0.4 percent in the third quarter of 2018, compared to the second quarter of 2018, the survey showed.

The number of employed persons increased by 92,000 to 16.4 million and the number of unemployed persons rose by 127,000 to 6.2 million in the third quarter of 2018, according to the survey.

The province with the lowest unemployment rate was Limpopo, at 18.9 percent, followed by the Western Cape at 20.4 percent and KwaZulu-Natal at 23 percent. The Free State had the highest provincial unemployment rate at 36.3 percent.

The dire job situation does not bode well for the government's drive to create jobs. The government hosted the Jobs Summit in early October, launching high-impact interventions to drive job creation, job retention and economic growth.