Florida's unemployment rate drops to 3.3 percent

Jacksonville's unemployment rate is only 2.9 percent

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – Florida's unemployment rate dropped to 3.3 percent in November, the lowest level it's been in 12 years.

The state released employment figures on Friday. The unemployment rate was down from 3.4 percent in October. Florida remains below the national unemployment rate of 3.7 percent.

Florida has 335,000 jobless residents out of a workforce of nearly 10.3 million people. The state has added 241,600 jobs over the past year.

Monroe County had the lowest unemployment rate at 2.4 percent, followed by St. Johns and Okaloosa counties at 2.5 percent.

Gulf County had the highest unemployment rate at 8.4 percent, followed by Bay County at 6.1 percent and Franklin County at 5 percent. All three counties were affected by Hurricane Michael.

When Gov. Rick Scott was sworn into the governor’s office in January 2011, the state’s jobless mark stood at 11.1 percent. The national mark at the time --- as Florida and the rest of the country recovered from a deep recession --- was 9.4 percent.

Scott, who had never held public office, pinned his 2010 gubernatorial campaign on creating jobs, using the theme, “Let’s Get to Work.” His tenure in office also coincided with broader national job growth.

“Being governor is the best job in the world, and I am excited about the economic success that Florida has been able to achieve over the past eight years,” Scott, who will move to the U.S. Senate in January, said in a prepared statement Friday.

The state’s peak unemployment from the recession was 11.3 percent in January 2010, three months before Scott opened a campaign account to run for governor. His platform included a seven-step economic program that “over a 7-year period --- will have a positive economic impact and create over 700,000 jobs for the state of Florida."

The target was at one time "on top of what normal growth would be."

On Friday, the governor’s office said Florida businesses have created more than 1.67 million private-sector jobs since December 2010, with the state’s employment growth rate outpacing the nation in 79 of the past 80 months. The outlier month was September 2017, when Hurricane Irma swept through the state.

The latest numbers from the Department of Economic Opportunity --- based on separate surveys of households and employers --- were driven by an increase in leisure and hospitality jobs, up 53,200 over the past year. Next highest were education and health services jobs, up 50,700 positions, followed by professional and business services, 45,400 jobs, and construction, 32,900 jobs.

Government jobs, mostly at the local level, fell by 9,600 in the same period.

 

Jacksonville jobs

The Jacksonville area added 10,500 new private-sector jobs in the past year, making the total number of new private-sector jobs created in Jacksonville 125,100 since December 2010.

The area’s unemployment rate was 2.9 percent in November, down 0.7 percentage point in the past year. Statewide, Florida businesses created 23,000 new jobs in November bringing the total number of new private-sector jobs created in Florida to 1,673,500 since December 2010.

The industry with the highest growth over the year in the Jacksonville area was education and health services with 3,100 new jobs. In November, Jacksonville had 25,914 job openings and of those, 7,588 were for high-skill, high-wage STEM jobs in November.

Florida’s unemployment rate of 3.3 percent represents a drop of 7.5 percentage points since December 2010; this drop is faster than the national decline of 5.6 percentage points. This is while 116,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.1 percent in the past year. Florida’s annual job growth rate of 3.3 percent continues to exceed the nation’s rate of 1.9 percent.

Click here to view the November 2018 employment data. 

News Service of Florida contributed to this report.