Labor Force and Employment

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Labor Force and Employment

Last Updated: April 18th, 2025

Summary

• The region’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 4.1 percent in March 2025, down 0.1 percentage points from February 2025 but 0.6 percentage points over March 2024.
• Lee County’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate was 4.0 percent in March 2025, down 0.2 percentage points from the previous month but 0.6 percentage points over the same month last year.
• The unemployment rate in Collier County was 3.9 percent in March 2025, a 0.1 percentage point decrease from February 2025 and 0.6 percentage points above March 2024.
• Charlotte County’s unemployment rate was 4.5 percent in March 2025, down 0.1 percentage points from the prior month and a 0.6 percentage point increase from March 2024.
• Hendry’s unemployment rate was 4.3 percent in March 2025, unchanged from February 2025 and 0.3 percentage points above the same month last year.
• Glades County had an unemployment rate of 5.1 percent in March 2025, down 0.3 percentage points from the previous month but 0.3 percentage points above March 2024.

About the Data

The charts above show total persons age 16 and over that were employed and unemployed in each county. The data comes from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics and is provided by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity (FDEO). The FDEO provides the following definitions regarding employment and unemployment:

• A person is considered employed if they did any work as paid employees, worked in their own business or farm, or worked 15 hours or more as unpaid workers in a family business during the reference week (normally the week including the 12th of the month). It also includes those who had a job but did not work due to a temporary absence. Each employed person is counted only once, even if they had more than one job.
• A person is considered unemployed if they did not have a job during the reference week, were available for work, and made specific efforts to find a job sometime during the 4 weeks prior to the reference week. 

The labor force is the sum of employed and unemployed in a given month, while the unemployment rate is the percent of the labor force that was unemployed. All data is seasonally-adjusted by the Regional Economic Research Institute using the X13-ARIMA-SEATS seasonal adjustment program, software that is produced, distributed and maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau. All data is updated on a monthly basis.

Technical Note

From the FloridaCommerce website: With the release of January 2025 labor statistics, BLS updated the commuting pattern data used to calculate county employment, the first annual cycle in at least 10 years. Prior to this latest revision cycle, the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) program had been utilizing commuting pattern data derived from the 2006-2010 5-year average American Community Survey (ACS) tables; this year BLS used updated information from the 2016-2020 ACS tables. This year’s revision introduced 10 years’ worth of commuting pattern changes all at once, which resulted in large revisions in areas where population and commuting trends have changed significantly between 2010 and 2020.  Historical corrections back to 2016 will also reflect this change.  Hence, many areas can be expected to display breaks in series between 2015 and 2016.