State Employment Trends

August 2011National Association of REALTORS®Research DivisionCompilation of Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data Highlights

• The US unemployment rate decreased slightly from 9.2 percent in June to 9.1 percent in July and is down 0.4 percent from a year ago.

• State by state, the pattern was somewhat different. Only 9 states saw unemployment go down in the month; an additional 13 saw no increase. Since July one year ago 37 states have had a decline in the unemployment rate. From one month ago, West Virginia and Louisiana had the largest declines.

• In July, North Dakota, Nebraska, and South Dakota had the lowest unemployment rates—all under 5 percent. At the same time, 11 states had double-digit unemployment rates.

More Highlights and Outlook

• 44 states and D.C. had positive job growth in the last year, and 31 states plus D.C. had positive job growth in July. The average change was 0.1%—near the historic average of national payroll job growth each month of 0.1% to 0.2%.

• The greatest job growth in July was in Hawaii while Minnesota had the largest job decline (as a share of previous payrolls).

• Moving forward, increasing labor force participation may keep the unemployment rate high even as jobs are being added. Hawaii is an example of that in July where unemployment crept up by 0.1 even as 6,700 payroll jobs were added—growing the number of jobs by 1.1% in a month.

• The following slides show state-level detail of unemployment rates and payroll employment.