Spain’s hospitality industry is doing particularly well. Samuel Sánchez

Job creation in Spain keeps speeding up at a pace unseen since before the financial crisis. Social Security affiliations, considered a measure of official job creation, grew by an average of 223,192 contributors in a single month, according to the Labor Ministry.

That is the best May since this statistical series began in 2001. The upward push has left the Social Security system with 683,575 more contributors in the last year, an annual rise of 3.87%.

The figures for May demonstrate the great weight of temporary jobs in the Spanish job market

Meanwhile, jobless claims fell by 111,908 for a total of 3.46 million, the lowest figure since June 2009.

For the last few months, the labor market has been creating jobs at a rate that improves on 2015, considered the best year since the economic recovery.

Before that, there was greater job creation in 2005, boosted in large part by the Socialist government’s immigrant regularization drive, which brought a lot of informal workers into the official economy.

The hospitality industry has been doing particularly well in recent years, and last month was no exception, with 65,409 new Social Security contributors. This sector was followed by administrative workers (24,349 new affiliations) and retail (15,793).

As for hirings, over two million contracts were signed in May, up nearly 16% from the same period last year. This figure demonstrates the great weight of temporary jobs in the Spanish job market, since only 8.2% of those contracts were open-ended.