Last month, a total 294,922 people were without a job, the ministry said in a statement.

Austria meanwhile maintained its position as the country with the lowest jobless rate in the 27-member bloc, at 4.5 percent according to the calculations of the EU's statistics agency Eurostat.

The difference between the figures is because Austria includes under-employed people who worked just a few hours during the given period in its unemployment calculations, unlike Eurostat.