State Labor Markets in February 2025
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State labor markets were again generally little-changed in February, though three states (Missouri, New Jersey, and Ohio) had statistically significant increases in payrolls; moves in all others were not significant., though in some cases were up or down by more than 10,000. The sum of payroll changes among the states was well under the national result (88,000 vs .151,000). The January numbers now show a loss of 4,000 jobs when the state figures are summed, which is very much under the nation’s 121,000 increase. There are any number of reasons why the summed state result will differ from the nations, not only different seasonal adjustment factors, but also different base quarters for benchmarking the not seasonally adjusted figures.
Florida was the only state to report a statistically significant change (up .1 percentage point) in its unemployment rate. The highest unemployment rates were in Nevada (5.8%), California (5.4%), DC (5.4%), Michigan (5.4%), and Kentucky. Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont had unemployment rates under 3.0%, while South Dakota’s 1.9% was again the lowest in the nation.
Puerto Rico’s unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.4% and the island’s job count inched up by 100.
Charles Steindel
AuthorMore in Author Profile »Charles Steindel has been editor of Business Economics, the journal of the National Association for Business Economics, since 2016. From 2014 to 2021 he was Resident Scholar at the Anisfield School of Business, Ramapo College of New Jersey. From 2010 to 2014 he was the first Chief Economist of the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, with responsibilities for economic and revenue projections and analysis of state economic policy. He came to the Treasury after a long career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where he played a major role in forecasting and policy advice and rose to the rank of Senior Vice-President. He has served in leadership positions in a number of professional organizations. In 2011 he received the William F. Butler Award from the New York Association for Business Economics, is a fellow of NABE and of the Money Marketeers of New York University, and has received several awards for articles published in Business Economics. In 2017 he delivered Ramapo College's Sebastian J. Raciti Memorial Lecture. He is a member of the panel for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia's Survey of Professional Forecasters and of the Committee on Research in Income and Wealth. He has published papers in a range of areas, and is the author of Economic Indicators for Professionals: Putting the Statistics into Perspective. He received his bachelor's degree from Emory University, his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a National Association for Business Economics Certified Business EconomistTM.
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