A survey from Statistics New Zealand has revealed the labour market is failing to keep pace with the country's population growth.

A study released today shows the unemployment rate has increased to 6 per cent in the September 2015 quarter – up from 5.9 per cent from the last quarter.

Most employment growth can be found in the construction industry. Photo: File.

The study also revealed 11,000 fewer people were employed than in the June quarter. This was the first quarterly fall in employment in three years.

'Until recently, the labour market has been keeping pace with New Zealand's population growth,” says labour market and households statistics manager Diane Ramsay.

'But in the past three months this has changed,”

Diane says the quarter also displayed the largest increase in the number of people outside the labour force since the March 2009 quarter.

For the year to the September 2015 quarter, annual employment growth slowed to 1.5 per cent, down from 3 per cent in the year to June 2015.

'Over the year, most growth was in construction,” Diane says.

'The vast majority of this growth was in Auckland, as construction growth there continued to outpace Canterbury”.

Auckland (11,500 people) and the Bay of Plenty (8,100 people) were the two largest contributors to annual employment growth.

Annual wage inflation, as measured by the labour cost index (LCI), remained at 1.6 per cent compared with annual consumer price inflation of 0.4 per cent.