Erath County followed a statewide trend last year as unemployment rates fell from the year before.
Examining monthly statistics from the Texas Workforce Commission, Erath County’s unemployment rate averaged 3.38% in 2022 compared to 4.48% in 2021.
The civilian labor force grew in the past year with the labor force averaging around 20,978 people in 2022 and 20,530 in 2021.
The average number of unemployed people in the prospective labor force fell from 919 in 2021 to 706 in 2022 as the worker pool rose.
Texas had its own good news to share at the new year. Texas led the country in new nonfarm jobs last year, according to a January report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
According to a report from the Texas Workforce Commission, the state continued a 14-month streak of record employment in December. And the state’s unemployment rate dropped to 3.9%, the first time it fell below 4% since the forced business closures at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
The state’s employers added 650,100 nonfarm payroll jobs — a 5% jump — between December 2021 and December 2022, according to the report. This rise surpassed that of California and Florida, which added 621,400 and 440,000 jobs, respectively.
In total, 13.7 million Texans were in nonfarm jobs at the end of 2022 compared to about 13 million at the end of 2021.
See accompanying tables for monthly Unemployment data in Erath County in 2021 and 2022.
Employment estimates released by TWC are produced in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.