The Bureau of Labor Statistics is basically back on schedule with their posting in the past few days of unemployment and employment data from April (they were weeks late with March’s data). 

We posted yesterday the free PDF file for this month’s data (current though April 2008) detailing state by state unemployment rates.  Here’s a link to our Free Resources page where the PDF is posted. 

As always the states are ranked in our posting based on a 6 month rolling average of the reported unemployment rate provided by the BLS; the number the BLS reports is the current unemployment rate, which of course changes every month.  We still think the 6 month rolling average tends to dampen out the swings in data the BLS tends to report and then later revise. 

The top five states are unchanged in this month’s report as compared to last month’s; South Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate at 2.7%, followed by Idaho and Wyoming at 2.9%, and Nebraska and Utah at 3.0%.  Michigan continues to post the highest unemployment rate, up a tenth of a percent to 7.2%. 

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