The Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released today 20 June state level unemployment and total nonfarm employment growth data; we’ve analyzed the data and run the numbers.

The top five states have shuffled a bit as compared to last month’s report.  South Dakota has the lowest unemployment rate at 2.7%, followed Wyoming at 2.9%, and Nebraska and Idaho at 3.0%, and Utah at 3.1%.  Michigan continues to post the highest unemployment rate, up by 0.2% to 7.4%.  Rhode Island has recorded an impressive gain in unemployment this month also.
 
We’ve just posted the FREE PDF file for this month’s data (current through May 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.
 

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