Figures issued by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today found the August jobless rate reversed a 0.2-percentage point rise in July, dropping back to the 5.1 per cent rate recorded in June.

Overall, there was a net increase of 30,900 jobs in August.

"'The rise in employment was driven by an increase in full-time employment, up 53,100 people to 7.920 million, that was partially offset by a decrease in part-time employment, down 22,100 people to 3.352 million,'' the bureau said.

There were also 22,500 fewer unemployed people.

The drop in the unemployment rate was also helped by a 0.1 percentage point drop in the labour force participation rate, to 65.4 per cent. The 5.3 per cent unemployment recorded in July was partly helped by a 0.2 percentage point increase in the participation rate to 65.5 per cent.

The ACT unemployment rate effectively improved by 0.3 points, falling to 3.1 per cent in trend terms. The bureau does not publish seasonally adjusted figures for the ACT's unemployment rate. It reported a trend rate of 3.4 per cent in July, but this was revised to 3.2 per cent in today's data.

Despite the fall in the national unemployment rate, the labour force underutilisation rate increased 0.2 points to 12.5 per cent because the under-employment rate - the proportion of people looking to work more hours - rose from 7 to 7.4 per cent.

The national youth unemployment rate fell from 18 per cent to 17.8 per cent.

The data also showed an increase of 14.8 million hours, or 0.9 per cent, worked in the month, to 1.59 billion hours in August compared with July.