Tallahassee, Fla. — Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that the Fort Lauderdale area added 11,700 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The Fort Lauderdale area’s unemployment rate was 3.0 percent in May, down 0.2 percentage point from one year ago.
The industries with the highest growth over the year in the Fort Lauderdale area were professional and business services with 6,000 new jobs and education and health services with 4,100 new jobs.
Fort Lauderdale remains among the top four metro areas in online job demand in Florida with 32,252 openings in May. Also, the area also had the fourth-highest number of openings for high-skill, high-wage STEM occupations with 8,927 job ads.
Statewide, Florida businesses created 16,000 new private-sector jobs in May 2019. Florida’s annual private-sector job growth rate of 2.7 percent continues to exceed the nation’s rate of 1.8 percent. Florida’s unemployment rate of 3.4 percent represents a drop of 0.3 percentage point over the year. This is while 124,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.2 percent in the past year.
To view the May 2019 employment data, visit www.floridajobs.org/labor-market-information/labor-market-information-press-releases/monthly-press-releases.