The national unemployment rate for April was 5.4%, essentially unchanged from March. And the lowest unemployment rate in the country was less than half that, 2.5% in Nebraska. No other state clocked in with an unemployment rate below 3%. In April of last year, Nebraska’s unemployment rate was 3.4%, trailing only North and South Dakota for the lowest rate among the states.

Eight states posted unemployment rates between 3% and 4%: North Dakota (3.1%), Utah (3.4%), South Dakota and Vermont (3.6%), Minnesota (3.7%), and Idaho, Iowa and New Hampshire (3.8%).

The data were released Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics in its April report on regional and state employment and unemployment.

The unemployment rate is higher than it was in April of 2014 in both North Dakota (2.7%) and South Dakota (3.4%). The slowdown in drilling in the oil patch is the likely culprit for the rise in North Dakota’s unemployment rate. The other state that has been hit hard by the slowdown in oil production is Texas, but the unemployment rate in Texas fell from 5.2% in April 2014 to 4.2% last month. The difference is likely down to the role of oil production in the state’s economy — oil is a far larger piece of North Dakota’s economy than it is of the Texas economy.

Only two states and the District of Columbia have unemployment rates at or above 7%: the District of Columbia’s unemployment rate is 7.5%, Nevada’s is 7.1% and West Virginia’s is 7.0%. The cuts to federal government jobs are likely to be mostly responsible for the high unemployment rate in D.C., while Nevada’s resort and casino business has yet to recover fully from the financial crisis. In West Virginia, the slowdown in demand for coal has limited the amount of mining that is still going on.

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