UPDATE 2-Brazil's jobless rate back under 10% after six years

(Adds economist's comment)

SAO PAULO, June 30 (Reuters) - Brazil's jobless rate fell to 9.8% in the three months through May, statistics agency IBGE said on Thursday, below market expectations and reaching a single-digit level for the first time since early 2016.

The median forecast in a Reuters poll projected an unemployment rate of 10.2%.

Brazil ended the period with 10.6 million unemployed people, down 11.5% from the previous quarter and 30.2% below the same period in 2021, IBGE said.

Brazil's government has been saying that an improvement in the labor market is expected to drive economic growth this year as Latin America's largest economy recovers from the pandemic-related downturn.

IBGE researcher Adriana Beringuy stressed the data represented an "expressive growth" fueled by several economic activities.

Alberto Ramos, an economist at Goldman Sachs, said the labor market improvement in the first half of 2022 was broader and deeper than originally anticipated, but is expected to soften in coming quarters given the expectation of below-trend growth in the remaining six months of this year and in 2023.

"The unemployment rate could also be impacted if the still sizeable number of discouraged workers outside the labor force start to search for jobs and return to the active labor force," Ramos said.

The latest jobless data was released as President Jair Bolsonaro campaigns for re-election in an October vote. Bolsonaro, who is trailing former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in opinion polls, said earlier this month he was "certain" that Brazil's unemployment rate would reach a single-digit level in a month.

The current unemployment rate is the lowest since the quarter through January 2016, when it hit 9.6%, according to IBGE. (Reporting by Gabriel Araujo and Camila Moreira; Additional reporting by Marcela Ayres; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Paul Simao)