Tallahassee, Fla. — Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that the Fort Lauderdale area added 13,400 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The Fort Lauderdale area’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent in October, down 0.3 percentage point from one year ago.
The industries with the highest growth over the year in the Fort Lauderdale area were education and health services with 3,800 new jobs and professional and business services with 3,600 new jobs.
Fort Lauderdale remains among the top four metro areas in online job demand in Florida with 29,831 openings in October. The area had the fifth-highest number of openings for high-skill, high-wage STEM occupations with 8,235 job ads.
Statewide, Florida businesses created 22,800 new private-sector jobs in October 2019. Florida’s annual private-sector job growth rate of 2.8 percent continues to exceed the nation’s rate of 1.5 percent. Florida’s unemployment rate of 3.2 percent represents a drop of 0.1 percentage point over the year. This is while 179,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.7 percent in the past year.
To view the October 2019 employment data, visit www.floridajobs.org/labor-market-information/labor-market-information-press-releases/monthly-press-releases.