Talent
The workforce, measured.
Who works in Guatemala, what they studied, how much English they speak, and what employing them costs.
The archive
Labor informality
64.9%Share of employment outside the formal system · ENEIC, Q1 2026
- Labor participation64.2%
- Open unemployment2.2%
- Visible underemployment12.9%
Minimum wage 2026, monthly
| Activity | CE1 | CE2 |
|---|---|---|
| Non-agricultural | 4,252.28 | 4,066.90 |
| Agricultural | 4,041.20 | 3,875.89 |
| Export and maquila | 3,659.73 | 3,471.10 |
Monthly totals including the Q250.00 incentive bonus, as set by Acuerdo Gubernativo 256-2025 (Diario de Centro América, 22 Dec 2025; in force 1 Jan 2026). CE1: department of Guatemala; CE2: rest of the country.
Who works, what they know, what they cost.
46 topics
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
The labor force, in numbers
36 topics- Labour force magnitudes: working-age, active, employed, unemployed
- The labour force by sex: men and women
- Indigenous peoples' share of the working-age and active population
- Participation, unemployment, underemployment and informality rates 2024–2025
- Average monthly labour income and the urban-rural gap
- Informality and unemployment by territorial domain and sex
- Sectoral structure of employment: agriculture, manufacturing, services
- Guatemala's adult literacy rate
See the other 28
- People trained by INTECAP each year
- INTECAP's training offer and funding model
- Guatemala's English level in the EF EPI 2025
- English by job function: sales, operations, IT and customer service
- English proficiency by department and city (EF EPI 2025)
- BPO hiring profile and the Finishing School programme
- Jobs and economic weight of the contact center and BPO sector
- Software developers in Guatemala: the GitHub proxy
- Payroll contributions: IGSS, INTECAP and IRTRA
- Average labour income per employee job, by activity (Banguat employment matrix 2024, derived)
- Dominant occupations and the share of wage employees
- Educational attainment of Guatemala's population
- Labour force evolution 2021–2024 and World Bank estimates
- Total population and pace of demographic growth
- Guatemala's median age and demographic dividend
- Average years of schooling and the Central American comparison
- Secondary and tertiary enrolment and upper-secondary graduates
- Student enrolment at the University of San Carlos (USAC)
- Private university enrolment: Landívar, UVG, Galileo and UFM
- University programmes in engineering and technology
- Public English scholarships under Guatemala No Se Detiene
- BPO sector service exports and how they are measured
- BPO expansion into secondary cities and the verticals it serves
- Bilingual call center agent salaries
- Wage costs for production workers, technicians and industrial engineers
- Legal day, night and mixed shifts and weekly hours
- Overtime pay and running plants 24/7
- Mandatory benefits: aguinaldo, Bono 14, incentive bonus and vacation
Social security, work permits and shifts
10 topics- Employer and employee IGSS contributions and total labor cost load
- Cost and timeline of the work permit at MINTRAB
- Who pays for the work permit and its legal basis
- Guatemalan-staff quota and limits on foreign employees
- Wage savings from locating outside the department of Guatemala
- IGSS employer registration: threshold and deadline
- 2026 minimum wage for maquila and export activity
- A sewing operator's true monthly cost, fully loaded
This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.
Universities and technical training
9 organizations
USAC — Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala
- Public university, the largest in the country (109,562 students in 2023), with open data from its Faculty of Engineering.
Universidad Rafael Landívar (URL)
- Private university with more than 30,000 active students.
UVG — Universidad del Valle de Guatemala
- Private university focused on engineering (computing, industrial, mechatronics, chemical) across three campuses (~8,000 students in 2025).
Universidad Galileo
- Private university that concentrates technology provision (FISICC systems/computing, FICON, FACTI); ~45,000 students according to a tertiary source.
UFM — Universidad Francisco Marroquín
- Private university (~2,700 students in 2023), origin of the faculty that gave rise to Universidad Galileo.
ERIS-USAC (Escuela Regional de Ingeniería Sanitaria, Universidad de San Carlos)
- Monitoring of the fall in the water table in the Guatemala valley (around 9 m a year on average; 8/11/7 m a year across 32 wells, 2013 study) published in the Revista Agua, Saneamiento & Ambiente; the source for the agua.nivel_freatico_valle indicator
- A balance of the metropolitan aquifer (with TNC): abstraction 502.3 against recharge 139.8 Mm³ a year, a deficit of 362.5, extraction at 3.59 times recharge; the source for the agua.deficit_acuifero indicator
Caltech (California Institute of Technology)
- An academic study of Banrural microcredit: a share of more than 50% of remittance payments, and loans taken with a relative in the United States as co-debtor (§9).
UNAM — Anuario de Derecho Constitucional
- An academic source that agrees on the date Guatemala ratified ILO Convention 169 (C169), 5 June 1996.