Tallahassee, Fla. — Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced the Pensacola area added 4,300 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The area’s unemployment rate was 3.4 percent in February, down 0.4 percentage point in the past year. Statewide, Florida businesses created 24,300 new private-sector jobs in February 2019.
To see the statewide job creation information, click here.
The industries with the highest growth over the year in the Pensacola area were leisure and hospitality with 1,100 new jobs and education and health services with 1,000 new jobs. In February, Pensacola had 6,078 job openings and of those, 1,783 were for high-skill, high-wage STEM jobs.
Florida’s annual private-sector job growth rate of 2.7 percent continues to exceed the nation’s rate of 1.9 percent. Florida’s unemployment rate of 3.5 percent represents a drop of 0.4 percentage point over the year. This is while 170,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.7 percent in the past year.
To view the February 2019 employment data, visit www.floridajobs.org/labor-market-information/labor-market-information-press-releases/monthly-press-releases.