The article examines the impact of active and passive labour market policies on the number of registered unemployment in Russia. The hypothesis is that active and passive policies implemented at the regional labour markets have a statistically significant effect on the number of registered unemployment. It was tested on the regional aggregated panel data from 2005 to 2014 using fixed-effect models. The models included characteristics of the population and its economic activity, the structure of the regional economies, years of external shocks, the size of unemployment benefits and the instruments of the active labour market policy, collected by the authors from 141 employment programs implemented in 76 regions of the Russian Federation. The sources of the data were official Rosstat publications, information from the websites of the authorities of the Russian Federation subjects and the open-accessed consultant systems. The estimated coefficients of regressions show a higher impact of the active labour market policies, implemented at the regional level, rather than the unemployment benefits established at the federal level, on the number of registered unemployment. The results of the research make us believe that the increase in the amount of unemployment benefits together with the reduction of their payments terms, as far as the further decentralization of the labour market policy with a special attention paid to the instruments, that increase flexibility of the labour market and competitiveness of the unemployed, will eventually contribute to convergence of the registered and real unemployment and enforce active and passive labour market policies.