Editor's Note: This report is based on survey data from March 2023 that was published in April 2023. This is the most recent data available. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)
The unemployment rate once again dropped to 3.5% nationally - a rate that has only been achieved a handful of times since the 1960’s.
18 states in total saw their unemployment rates go down, led by New Hampshire, Oregon, and West Virginia at minus 0.3% apiece. Washington DC was the only ‘state’ that saw its unemployment rate climb over the month, with a plus 0.1% increase.
Over the course of the last 12 months, 42 states have seen their payroll entries increase overall - ranging from Maryland and Wisconsin at 1.3% and 1.4% growth, respectively, to Nevada at 5% year-over-year growth.
Below is the breakdown of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) market employment summary for April 2023.
States With the Highest Unemployment Rates
Part of what has enabled Nevada to achieve the highest workforce growth rate over the last year was having been hit especially hard by the pandemic in the first place, and in fact Nevada currently remains the state with the highest unemployment rate at 5.5% and is the only state registering above 5.0% for the second month in a row.
Washington DC had the next highest unemployment rate at 4.8% - and in fact was the only state that registered an increase in unemployment over the course of the month (0.1%) - followed by Washington state and 4.5%.
Over the last year, 10 states have registered increases in their unemployment rates, with Oregon on the top of that list at plus 0.9% followed by Washington state and 0.6%.
South Dakota emerged as the state with the lowest unemployment rate last month, reporting a rate of 1.9% - a 0.2% drop from last month when the Dakotas shared top honors for lowest unemployment rate at 2.1% each.
North Dakota held steady at 2.1%, the second lowest reported rate, where it was joined by New Hampshire.
There were 11 states in total that saw reduced unemployment rates over the last 12 months, led by Alaska and Colorado at minus 0.9% and minus 0.6%, respectively.
There were no net job losses as of this latest report.
Despite the increase of more than 230 thousand jobs, only 2 states registered a net increase in total employment - Kentucky, which saw an increase of almost 10 thousand jobs for a 0.4% increase, and Massachusetts, which added more than 16 thousand jobs last month representing 0.4% growth in its workforce from month to month.
The data from which this analysis is drawn comes from March and rounds out the last month of the first quarter of 2023.
While this latest economic news isn’t quite as positive as it had been in the first months of the new year, there were still hundreds of thousands of new jobs added, a number that was essentially right on target with the consensus economic forecast.
Considering that there were multiple bank failures last month that required intervention from the federal government to prevent potential further bank runs on similarly situated financial institutions, this month’s report starts looking better and better.
That said, the immediate aftereffects of those bank collapses are only partially represented in the current data. Next month, we may very well see additional SVB-related fallout, but so far the range of potential repercussions from those kinds of financial-system wide tremors seems to be narrowing in favor of federal regulators having conducted effective triage work. Time will tell in the months to come.
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