States Where Unemployment Remains High

The national unemployment rate is a little under 4 percent way below the mid-double digits levels seen at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. economy has been grappling with the after-effects of the pandemic, with high inflation sparking aggressive rate hikes from the Federal Reserve which are now at two-decade highs. The elevated rates have slowed the economy somewhat but the jobs market has been resilient and is now at 3.8 percent from the high of nearly 15 percent in April 2020.

But the U.S. is a large, diverse country, with 50 states and the District of Columbia, all with different dynamics that shape their labor market.

The states, such as California, Nevada and D.C, that have higher unemployment than other parts of the country, saw significant job losses during the pandemic and may still be struggling to recover.

Nevada, for example, had the highest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) released on Friday. At the height of the pandemic, the jobless rate in Nevada ballooned to nearly 31 percent in April 2020, the highest in the country. The state relies substantially on the arts, recreation and food services, an economy that experienced significant disruption as a result of the COVID-related lockdowns.

"Nevada would have been the hardest hit state during the pandemic recession," Thomas Krolik, an economist at BLS, told Newsweek.

The state's job situation has improved substantially and the unemployment rate has dropped since those losses in the spring and early summer of 2020. It has hovered around 5 percent for about a year now.

"Since the peak unemployment in the first half of 2020, rates have come down substantially. But in some cases, they haven't come down quite to where they were prior to the pandemic, and I think Nevada would be one of those cases," Krolik said. "The effects of economic activities being curtailed would be greater in a state like Nevada, where the industry mix is more heavily weighted toward leisure and hospitality, for example."

One thing Krolic pointed out was that despite Nevada having the highest unemployment rate, the state has seen little disruption in its jobs market recently. It has been under 6 percent unemployment rate since October 2021 and has hovered between 5.2 to 5.6 percent since the end of that year.

"So they've been holding steady," he told Newsweek. "They're tracking a very steady unemployment rate there."

Other states that showed a high unemployment rate included California. The Sunshine State, which is one of the world's largest economies, saw the unemployment rate a little under 5 percent in September. It has come down substantially from the COVID highs in April 2020 it spiked to over 16 percent. The current rate, while one of the highest in the country, is just a little over pre-pandemic levels.

California relies on its entertainment industry, a sector that has had some disruptions with a writers and actors strike over the last few months, which could affect its job situations.

Krolik suggested that it may not be quite as simple as that.

"Strikers would not be unemployed technically," he said. "Obviously in and around Los Angeles, entertainment activities are large, but in a state with 50 million people", it was hard to say how much impact that would have had.

On the flip side, one state appeared to be doing great: Maryland boasted an unemployment rate of 1.6 percent, the lowest in the country.