This Is the Unemployment Rate in American’s Smallest City

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 7, 7:48AM EST

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This Is the Unemployment Rate in American’s Smallest City — © johnrandallalves / Getty Images

Once a month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out its Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment Summary. The October edition was just released. The analysis covers unemployment in America’s 389 metropolitan areas and compares them to, among other things, the same month the year before.

For October, the jobless rate was higher in 384 of the 389 metropolitan areas, compared to the same month in 2019. A total of 124 areas had jobless rates of less than 5% and 16 areas had rates of at least 10%.

The smallest of these metro areas is Carson City, Nevada, which has a population of 55,916. Its jobless rate was 6.6%, double the 3.3% from the same month the year before.

The metro sits east of Lake Tahoe, on the California border. It is over 200 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the largest metro area in the state.
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Carson City’s unemployment rate is well below Nevada’s, which was 11.8% in October. This is due to the unemployment rate of 13.8% in the Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise metro. The Las Vegas number collapsed as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the tourism and gambling industries.

Carson City has a relatively dense population for a city in a state with a population that is not. It covers 145 square miles and has a density of 386 per square mile.

Carson City has a median household income of $57,270, which is about 90% of the national number. Its poverty rate near 12% is about the same as the U.S. average.

The median value of an occupied home in Carson City is $325,200, or about 1.4 times the national average.

Just below 87% of the residents have an education of high school graduate, or about the same as the national figure. Just over 23% have a bachelor’s degree or better, about two-thirds of the U.S. figure.

Carson City’s unemployment rate is far below Nevada’s because gambling companies and hotels are not among its largest employers. The Carson City School District, Carson Tahoe Health, the City of Carson, the Nevada Department of Transportation, Western Nevada College, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles and the Nevada Department of Corrections have the largest workforces in the metro. Among the others are Walmart and Costco.

Carson has dodged Nevada’s gambling industry problem and will continue to do so, given its largest employers.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.