Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, August 8, 2026 – Puerto Vallarta ended June with 1,219 fewer formal tourism jobs than a year earlier, a 4.6% decline that adds a hard employment measure to reports of a prolonged slowdown across restaurants, shops and tourism-dependent businesses during the first half of 2026.
The latest Jalisco Institute of Information, Statistics and Geography data, compiled from IMSS records, counted 25,569 tourism-related jobs in Puerto Vallarta in June. The comparable June 2025 report recorded 26,788.
Total formal employment in the municipality also slipped, from 83,650 workers in June 2025 to 83,018 this June. Tourism-related employment accounted for 30.8% of Puerto Vallarta’s formal jobs at the end of the first half, making changes in visitor activity have an unusually direct connection to local paychecks.
Restaurants, retailers, service providers and small businesses experienced an unusually long slowdown during the first half, with weaker sales and tighter cash flow stretching well beyond the normal seasonal transition.
Airport data provide another measure of that decline. Grupo Aeroportuario del Pacífico’s June passenger figures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission show Puerto Vallarta International Airport handled 3.32 million passengers between January and June, compared with 3.81 million during the same period last year.
That amounted to roughly 483,700 fewer passengers and a 12.7% decline. International traffic fell 18.2%, from 2.32 million passengers to 1.90 million, while domestic traffic declined 4%.
Hotel performance moved in the same direction. A DATATUR comparison placed average first-half hotel occupancy at 69.38%, down from 75.41% during the comparable 2025 period. June was the lone monthly improvement, reaching 68.2% compared with 62.4% a year earlier.
The national Afore numbers add another economic signal, although they should be kept separate from Puerto Vallarta’s local indicators.
CONSAR’s June statistics recorded 190,591 workers making approved unemployment withdrawals, up from 150,016 in June 2025. National first-half data put the January-through-June total at 1,042,428 workers and 22.44 billion pesos, with the amount withdrawn rising 28.2% from the first half of 2025.
Those are national figures. The CONSAR data cited here do not provide a breakdown for Puerto Vallarta, so the record-level of Afore withdrawals cannot be assigned specifically to workers in the city.
An unemployment withdrawal also carries a longer-term cost. CONSAR states that an IMSS unemployment withdrawal results in a proportional reduction in credited contribution weeks. Those weeks can be recovered later by returning some or all of the withdrawn funds to the retirement account.
The latest airport numbers show that Puerto Vallarta’s weakness in air travel continued beyond the first half. PVDN reported this week that July traffic fell another 12.1% from a year earlier. Domestic passengers edged up 0.6%, but international traffic dropped 29.8%, extending the sharp divide between the city’s domestic and international air markets into the summer.
