Unemployment Rate Drops Below 2.9% in 5 States

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 12:46PM EST · Published Apr 22, 8:15AM EDT

Follow 24/7 Wall St. on Google

This post may contain links from our sponsors and affiliates, and Flywheel Publishing may receive compensation for actions taken through them.

Unemployment Rate Drops Below 2.9% in 5 States — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”507121″ placement=”ros”]The national unemployment rate for March was 4.5%. In five states is it much lower, below 2.9%, which shows how much the jobless situation can differ from place to place.

In March, the unemployment rate in Hawaii was 2.7%. It was 2.6% in Colorado and 2.8% in New Hampshire. It was 2.8% in both North Dakota and in South Dakota as well.

If 4.5% is considered “full employment” by many economists, what is the situation in these five states called? Presumably, many employers cannot find new employees because virtually everyone in the population has jobs. That, in many ways, is bad news.

The Dakotas have had low unemployment for many years. Some of this has been due to the fracking industry, which has brought in workers needed by oil companies. Unemployment has been low in the Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont areas as well. Maine’s unemployment rate last month was 3%, as was Vermont’s.
[nativounit]

A look at state unemployment across the nation according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics assessment for March:

Colorado had the lowest unemployment rate in March, 2.6 percent, closely followed by Hawaii, 2.7 percent, and New Hampshire, North Dakota, and South Dakota, 2.8 percent each. The rates in Arkansas (3.6 percent), Colorado (2.6 percent), Maine (3.0 percent), and Oregon (3.8 percent) set new series lows. (All state series begin in 1976.) New Mexico had the highest jobless rate, 6.7 percent. In total, 19 states had unemployment rates lower than the U.S. figure of 4.5 percent, 7 states and the District of Columbia had higher rates, and 24 states had rates that were not appreciably different from that of the nation.

In March, 17 states had unemployment rate decreases, the largest of which was in Illinois (-0.5 percentage point). The remaining 33 states and the District of Columbia had jobless rates that were not notably different from those of a month earlier, though some had changes that were at least as large numerically as the significant changes.

Eighteen states had unemployment rate changes from March 2016, all of which were decreases. The largest of these declines occurred in West Virginia (-1.3 percentage points) and Illinois and Nevada (-1.2 points each)

[wallst_email_signup]

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.