THE region's unemployment rate continues to soar with the latest figures also showing it takes much longer for jobless people to find work.

The Darling Downs region's unemployment rate has increased from 3.8% in February last year to 5% in the same month this year, according to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics figures.

The number of unemployed people in the region has also risen from 2600 to 3200 in the same period.

The figures released on Thursday show it is also taking longer for unemployed people in the Darling Downs to find a job.

In February last year it took an unemployed person about 24 weeks on average to find a job. Now the job search is taking 38 weeks - about nine months - on average.

Last week the ABS reported the Queensland seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for February was 6.7%, up 0.2% in a month.

Without taking seasonal employment trends into account, the unemployment rate for Queensland was 7.4% in February.

ABS Labour Force Support Surveys director Stephen Collett said an overall increasing unemployment rate could come down to one simple fact; there were not enough jobs for an increasing population.

"The number of people employed isn't going up fast enough to match that increase in population," he said.

The ABS surveys thousands of people across the country to collect employment data.

Mr Collett said narrowing it down to specific regions was more difficult because they used smaller sample sizes.

He said many regions had seasonal employment trends that varied month to month, including fruit picking.

"Labour markets behave differently all over the place," he said.

University employment relations professor David Peetz said overall unemployment rates had been going up consistently, the result of several factors including local economies, government policies and what was trending nationally. He said some unemployment rates were now worse than they were during the peak of the global financial crisis.

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