Migrant worker numbers surpass 262m in 2012, increase of 3.9%

China had over 262 million migrant workers by the end of 2012, a 3.9 percent increase over the last year, said a Monday report from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

Last year, over 40 percent of them worked in China's eastern regions, followed by 30 percent in central areas.

The proportion of workers in the eastern regions dropped by 0.7 percentage points.

Meanwhile, the proportion of workers seeking jobs outside their home provinces dropped by 0.3 percentage points over the period.

"Urbanization has been accelerating, which helps small towns to create more jobs. That's why more and more people choose to work near where they come from," Zhang Yi, a researcher with the Institute of Population and Labor Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Monday.

"However, the general trend of moving from the west to the east has not changed. Young people still prefer to work in large cities," said Zhang.

According to the report, male workers accounted for 66.4 percent of the total in 2012, and the proportion of young migrant workers kept decreasing.

The average age of the workers was 37.2 years.

The survey also showed that nearly 70 percent of them received no technical training.

Zhang said that as more young workers are going to vocational schools, or are receiving specialized training, the proportion is still low because the population base is so large.

He said he expected the number of migrant workers will keep rising slowly until 2020 if current policy regarding employment remains unchanged. It may start to fall after 2030.

Migrants' per capita monthly income was 2,290 yuan ($370) by the end of 2012, up 11.8 percent on a yearly basis, but the growth rate was 9.4 percentage points lower.

The transportation and construction sectors offered higher salaries, while the service, catering and manufacturing sectors offered less money, according to the survey.

The survey questioned around 200,000 migrant workers from over 7,500 villages, the NBS said.