Jobless Rate in This City Is Barely Above 1%

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jan 6, 6:15AM EST

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Jobless Rate in This City Is Barely Above 1% — © Michael Gordon / Wikimedia Commons

America has enjoyed its lowest unemployment in five decades as the national figure has fallen to 3.3% in recent months. According to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in one city, it was only a fraction of that. The lowest unemployment rate in the nation was in Logan, Utah, at 1.5% in November, the most recent month for which information is available.

Out of the 389 metro areas in America, the unemployment rate was lower in November in 223, compared to November last year. It was higher in 137 areas and unchanged in 29.

Logan is among the smaller metros in America and ranks 292nd. Its labor force is only 73,570. Of those, only 1,126 people were unemployed in November.

Eighty-four percent of the population in Logan is white, according to the Census Bureau. Ninety percent of the population has at least a high school education and 35% has a college degree or better, each above the national average. Twenty percent of the households in Logan have incomes over $75,000. For a city with low unemployment, the poverty rate is particularly high at 25%.

Logan has another substantial advantage over most metro areas. It has a small number of organizations or companies that dominate the job pool. Utah State University is the largest of these. It employs roughly 8,000 people. Medical organizations, led by Logan Regional Hospital, employ another 2,500. Manufacturers, led by Icon and E.A. Miller, support about another 2,000. Because of their stable employment situations, Logan is unlikely to see much of a rise in joblessness.

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Is there anything other cities can learn from the situation in Logan? Probably the answer is no. Its residents have been fortunate to enjoy employment circumstances that do not exist in most other cities.

According to 24/7 Wall St., these are the 50 best American cities to live in.

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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.