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CLT in MotionArticle

Six years of formally registered employment in Brazil, from the pandemic collapse to the 2025 slowdown, set against a long-run trend reaching back to 2007, with forecasts to mid-2027 and a data dossier on the proposed end of the 6×1 work schedule. Built end to end from official CAGED microdata.

Data Storytelling / Labor Economics
2026
CAGED (Antigo 2007–2019 + Novo) · PDET / MTE
PT · EN · ES

What this is

An editorial, data-driven report on the Brazilian formal labor market, the CLT universe of fully-registered jobs, drawn directly from the official CAGED microdata. It reads the last six years as one continuous story: the pandemic collapse, the V-shaped rebound, and the cooling expansion of 2024–2026, then projects the national and per-state series through June 2027. A long-run trend line extends the picture back to 2007, using the legacy CAGED to frame the recent cycle against two decades of formal employment.

The closing chapter is a dossier on the most consequential labor debate in Brazil since 1988: the proposal to replace the 6×1 schedule (six workdays, one rest day) with 5×2. Using contracted-hours data, it maps which sectors are most exposed and weighs the proposal against peer-reviewed economic literature.

The report is fully interactive and self-contained, with sortable tables, a per-state explorer and confidence bands, published in Portuguese, English and Spanish. This page is the summary; the buttons above open the live version.

Key figures

10.0 M
Net formal jobs since Jan 2020
1.21 M
Net balance, last 12 months
81%
of hires contracted at 44h
–902 k
Worst month (Apr 2020)
→ Jun 2027
Forecast horizon, 95% CI by state
27
States modeled individually

Inside the report

  • Overview & trajectory — the monthly net balance from 2020 to today, with the 12-month moving average tracing the country's economic arc.
  • Geography — regional concentration of job creation and an interactive explorer for the series and forecast of every state.
  • Seasonality — a state-by-month heatmap exposing the annual hiring clock and the universal December layoff band.
  • Forecast — SARIMA, ETS (Holt-Winters), Seasonal Naive and machine-learning (Random Forest, LightGBM) projections to mid-2027, with the best model selected per series by out-of-sample validation.
  • 6×1 dossier — sectoral exposure to the 44-hour week, scenarios for the reform, and a peer-reviewed evidence base with verifiable DOIs.

Methodology

The net balance reproduces the official "unadjusted" Novo CAGED series exactly, as the sum of net movements per reference period. The core analysis and all forecasts use the Novo CAGED (eSocial-based) from January 2020 onward; the pre-2020 trend line is built from the legacy CAGED (Law 4.923/65 declarations, 2007–2019), shown only as long-run context. The January 2020 switch from the old declarations to eSocial is a methodological break, so the two eras are not strictly comparable and the report marks that boundary explicitly. A handful of legacy months whose MTE archives are corrupt are filled by time interpolation and flagged in the report. Working time is read from the horascontratuais field, with the 44-hour week used as a proxy for the 6×1 universe. Forecasts come from classical and machine-learning time-series models, selected per series by RMSE in a 12-month holdout, with explicit diagnostics for seasonality and heteroskedasticity.

The literature review behind the dossier was assembled through a scientific paper-lookup protocol over the OpenAlex base, with no fabricated references: every cited study carries a verifiable DOI. The full code and data pipeline are open source.

Python pandas statsmodels (SARIMA / ETS) Plotly CAGED microdata (2007–2026) OpenAlex

Read the full report

The interactive edition opens in a new tab. Pick a language:

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