Unemployment Rate at 7% in Nevada and West Virginia

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jun 20, 8:55AM EDT

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While the U.S. unemployment rate hovers around 5.5%, and America added 280,000 jobs in May, some portions of the country have not entirely escaped the tail end of the recession. The jobless rate is 7.0% in Nevada and 7.2% in West Virginia.

One of the best ways to evaluate how badly off the employment situations are in the two states is to look at the other side of the job market by state. The unemployment rate is below 4% in 10 states: Vermont (3.6%), Utah (3.5%), South Dakota (3.8%), North Dakota (3.1%), New Hampshire (3.8%), Nebraska (2.6%), Montana (3.9%), Minnesota (3.8%), Iowa (3.8%) and Idaho (3.9%). It pays to live in the Plains states.

The unemployment pace is going in opposite directions in West Virginia and Nevada. The unemployment rate in Nevada was 7.9% a year ago in May. It was 6.7% in West Virginia in that same month. Regardless of which way the jobless rate moves in the two states, neither affect the national figures much. West Virginia is that 38th state ranked by total population at 1.85 million. Nevada is 36th at 2.8 million.

Based on state figures, nationwide the bounce back from the recession has slowed, now that the recovery has entered a third year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Regional and state unemployment rates were little changed in May. Twenty-five states had unemployment rate increases from April, 9 states and the District of Columbia had decreases, and 16 states had no change, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Forty-five states and the District of Columbia had unemployment rate decreases from a year earlier and five states had increases. The national jobless rate was essentially unchanged from April at 5.5 percent and was 0.8 percentage point lower than in May 2014.

Not much comfort to many of the residents of Nevada and West Virginia.

ALSO READ: The Best and Worst States to Be Unemployed

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.