South Africa's unemployment rate was unchanged at 26.7 percent of the labour force in the first quarter of 2018 compared with the last quarter of 2017, the statistics office said on Tuesday.

In its quarterly labour force survey which polls households, Statistics South Africa said there were 6.0 million people without jobs in the three months to the end of March, compared with 5.9 million people in the final three months of last year.

The expanded definition of unemployment, which includes people who have stopped looking for work, rose to 36.7 percent in the first quarter from 36.3 percent in the previous quarter.

- Reuters