Labor market dataBLS data for August 2026, read at source 29 September 2026

Unemployment Rate by State: August 2026 Figures, and What They Mean for Hiring

The national unemployment rate was 4.1% in August 2026, and state rates ranged from 2.0% in South Dakota to 5.7% in the District of Columbia — a spread of 3.7 percentage points. The median state sat at 3.9%. Seventeen states were below 3.5%, which is the level at which employers stop competing for applicants and start competing for other employers' staff. The table below has all 51 jurisdictions; the tool under it tells you what your state's number actually implies for filling a role.

Unemployment rate by state, August 2026

Seasonally adjusted, ranked from lowest to highest. Tied rates share a rank, which is why the numbering skips. The final column is the gap against the national rate of 4.1%.

What your state's number means for hiring

Pick a state to see its rate, its rank, and a plain reading of what that implies for filling a role there. Nothing is sent or stored — this runs in your browser.

How to read the number without misreading it

The unemployment rate is a useful proxy for hiring difficulty and a bad substitute for thinking. Four cautions are worth more than the table itself.

It is measured by residence, not by workplace. BLS states plainly that the data “refer to place of residence.” If your plant sits ten minutes from a state line, neither state's figure describes your actual labor shed. The commuting area is the unit that matters, and no state table can give it to you.

A state is not a market. The spread within a large state is routinely wider than the spread between states. California at 5.1% contains both metropolitan areas well below the national rate and interior counties far above it. Where county or metropolitan figures exist for your area, they beat the state number every time.

It counts people looking, not people available. The rate measures those actively seeking work as a share of the labor force. It says nothing about the far larger group who are employed and would move for the right job — which, in a tight market, is the only group that matters. A state at 2.6% does not mean there is nobody to hire; it means the people you want already have jobs.

It says nothing about your occupation. A state can post a low overall rate while a specific trade in that state has more applicants than openings, and the reverse. Where an occupation has its own data — projected openings, typical entry route — that data is more directly useful than the aggregate rate.

What the spread looked like this month

Three groupings are worth naming. At the tight end, South Dakota (2.0%), North Dakota (2.2%), Vermont (2.6%), Hawaii (2.7%) and New Hampshire (2.8%) all sat more than a full point below the national rate — small labor forces where a single large employer's hiring can move the number.

In the middle, a dense cluster ran from about 3.6% to 4.4%, including Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. These are markets where national hiring benchmarks transfer reasonably well.

At the loose end, eight jurisdictions sat at 4.8% or above, led by the District of Columbia at 5.7%, along with California, Connecticut and Oregon at 5.1%, Michigan at 5.0%, Arizona and Washington at 4.9%, and Nevada at 4.8%. In those markets, applicant volume is generally not the problem.

The direction of travel is flat. At one decimal place, August rates were lower than July’s in 28 jurisdictions, higher in 4 and unchanged in 19, and one-tenth moves in a single month are often within sampling error. Against August 2025, 30 jurisdictions were lower, 17 higher and 4 unchanged. The national rate was 4.1%, the same as in July. This is a labor market that is moving sideways, which means the state you hire in matters more than the month you hire in.

If your state sits at the tight end, the next question is how to reach people who are not searching. Our guides to the frontline labor shortage and to employee turnover rates by industry cover the two forces that decide most of it.

The hiring rate, and why it is often the more useful number

The unemployment rate tells you how many people are looking. The hiring rate tells you how fast employers are actually moving people into jobs. They are different measurements from different surveys, and for a hiring decision the second one is frequently the one that changes what you do.

BLS defines it plainly in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey: the hires rate is the number of hires during the entire month as a percent of employment. For July 2026 — the most recent JOLTS month when this page was updated — there were 5.1 million hires and a hires rate of 3.2%, which BLS described as little changed. The job openings rate was 4.4%, the quits rate 1.9%, and total separations 3.2%.

Put the first and last of those side by side and you have the shape of the market: hires 3.2%, separations 3.2%. Employment is being replaced, not added to. In a month like that, almost every hire you make is filling a seat someone else vacated, and so is your competitor's.

Hiring rate by industry, July 2026

The spread is the point. Accommodation and food services turns over more than twice as fast as manufacturing, and a state unemployment figure will not tell you that, because it averages every industry in the state into one number.

Health care is the case worth sitting with. A 2.8% hires rate against a national openings rate of 4.4% is not a demand problem — the roles are posted and funded. It is a supply problem: the openings are not converting into hires. That points at licensing pipelines, pay bands and shift design, and it is close to the opposite of what a low state unemployment rate on its own would suggest, which is usually read as "spend more to reach the few people left".

Why this table is national and not by state

BLS does publish JOLTS estimates at state level, but they are a different animal and worth understanding before you quote one. They are model-based rather than measured directly — BLS states that "state estimates have been produced by combining the available sample with model-based estimates" — and the model is built on QCEW data that lags current JOLTS production by six to nine months. BLS also cautions that where states within one region differ from each other in their ratio of openings to hires, "the model cannot detect that and estimates will not reflect those differences." On top of that, beginning with July 2026 the state-level estimates moved to an annual release rather than a monthly one.

So the practical split is this: use the state table above for the timely local read, because it is monthly and measured. Use the national industry hiring rate for how fast your sector actually moves. Reach for the state JOLTS series only for a long-run trend, and cite its date.

What this page cannot do

It cannot tell you about your county, your metropolitan area, or your commuting shed, and for most employers those are the numbers that matter. It cannot tell you about your occupation. And it cannot tell you what will happen next: these are preliminary estimates subject to revision, published monthly, and a single month's movement in a small state is frequently noise.

What it can do is set expectations before you spend money. An employer in a 2.6% market who budgets for the applicant volume a 5.2% market produces will conclude that their advertising failed, when what actually happened is that they mistook the labor market for the campaign.

Frequently asked questions