Maine Unemployment Rate 3.0 Percent in December Bookmark and Share

January 23, 2018

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 23, 2018

Contact: Glenn Mills 207-621-5192

AUGUSTA ? 2017 ends on a positive note with strong private sector job growth and historically low unemployment.

Seasonally Adjusted Statewide Data

Household Survey Estimates ? The preliminary seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 3.0 percent for December was down from 3.3 percent for November and 3.8 percent one year ago. The number of unemployed was down 5,400 over the year to 20,700. The unemployment rate has been at or below 4.0 percent for 27 consecutive months. The U.S. preliminary unemployment rate of 4.1 percent for December was unchanged from November and down from 4.7 percent one year ago. The New England unemployment rate averaged 3.7 percent.

December unemployment estimates for other states in the region were 2.6 percent in New Hampshire, 2.8 percent in Vermont, 3.5 percent in Massachusetts, 4.4 percent in Rhode Island, and 4.6 percent in Connecticut. The employment to population ratio estimate of 61.7 percent remained above the 60.1 percent U.S. average.

Payroll Survey Estimates ? The 622,600 preliminary nonfarm payroll jobs estimate for December was up 5,000 from one year ago. The private sector gained 5,200 jobs, with the largest gains in the healthcare and social assistance, and professional and business services sectors. Jobs in government were down 200.

Not Seasonally Adjusted Substate Data

The not seasonally adjusted statewide unemployment rate estimate of 2.5 percent for December was down from 3.5 percent one year ago. Unemployment rates decreased over the year in all counties. The lowest rate was 1.8 percent in Cumberland County and the highest was 4.2 percent in Aroostook County.

The unemployment rate was below the statewide average in the Portland-South Portland (1.8 percent) and Lewiston-Auburn (2.1 percent) metro areas and at the average in the Bangor (2.5 percent) metro area.

Due to annual data revisions, release of January estimates will be delayed until Monday, March 12 (Data Release Schedule: http://www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/releaseDates.html ).

This release is available at http://www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/news/release.html .

Labor force and unemployment data is available at http://www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/laus1.html .

Nonfarm payroll jobs data is available at http://www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/ces1.html .

Monthly workforce estimates are cooperatively produced and released by the Maine Department of Labor, Center for Workforce Research and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

NOTES

  1. Preliminary labor force estimates, including rates (labor force participation, employment, and unemployment rates), and levels (labor force, employed, and unemployed) tend to move in a direction for several months and then reverse course. Those directional trends are largely driven by a smoothing procedure and may not indicate a change in underlying workforce conditions. Annual revisions (published in March each year) tend to moderate or eliminate those directional patterns. A comparison of 2016 preliminary and revised unemployment rate estimates is available at www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/blogs/2016workforcedata_revisions.pdf.

  2. The 90 percent confidence interval for statewide unemployment rates in 2017 is 0.7 percentage points above or below the published estimate each month.

  3. To assess employment growth, we recommend looking at nonfarm jobs from the payroll survey rather than resident employment from the household survey. The payroll survey is larger, has smaller margins of error, and is subject to smaller revisions. More on the differences in accuracy of the two measures is at www.maine.gov/labor/cwri/blogs/imprecise_data.pdf .

  4. Nonfarm payroll jobs estimates tend to be volatile from month to month because there is variability in the sample of reporting employers and their representativeness for the universe of all employers. Additionally, seasonal adjustment is imperfect because weather, the beginning and ending of school semesters and holidays, and other events do not always occur with the same timing, which can exacerbate monthly volatility. Users should look to the trend over multiple months rather than the change from one specific month to another. Estimates for the period from October 2016 to September 2017 will be replaced with actual payroll data in March 2018. Those benchmark revisions are likely to show less volatility than preliminary estimates.

  • end -

.