As the U.S. rolls into what some experts are calling a “soft landing” from the turbulent economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, some areas of the country are getting particularly hot for job growth.
This month, ZipRecruiter released an analysis of U.S. Department of Labor Statistics data that included a ranking of the hottest labor markets based on year-over-year job growth. While another recent report found that Southern cities were doing particularly well, ZipRecruiter’s list featured municipalities from regions across the U.S., with the Midwest well represented.
Here’s their list of the 11 hottest U.S. labor markets:
1. Ocean City, N.J. – 8.8% growth
2. Manhattan, Kan. – 8.0% growth
3. Lawrence, Kan. – 6.8% growth
4. Charleston-North Charleston, S.C. – 5.7% growth
5. Pocatello, Idaho – 4.8% growth
6. Mankato-North Mankato, Minn. – 4.3% growth
7. Bloomington, Ind. – 4.3% growth
8. Raleigh, N.C. – 4.2% growth
9. Salinas, Calif. – 4.1% growth
10. Las Vegas-Henderson-Paradise, Nev. – 4.1% growth
11. Rochester, Minn. – 4.1% growth
“Employment expanded in the vast majority of metropolitan areas in the U.S. in 2023, with only 8% shedding jobs,” said ZipRecruiter.
Earlier this month, the BLS released data that showed a surprising gain of 353,000 in January.
“It was huge in light of what’s been expected,” said CNBC Senior Economics Reporter Steve Liesman in an interview with Audacy.
Last month, ZipRecruiter also released its 2024 Labor Market Outlook report. While it noted that the decade got off to a “rocky start” with labor market issues related to the pandemic and high inflation, it said that last year “inflation cooled more quickly than the labor market, setting us up for what many economists believed was a low-probability scenario, ‘the soft landing.’”
Going forward ZipRecruiter expects that, if inflation continues to soften, unemployment will eventually go up and the Federal Reserve Bank will lower interest rates they raised in an effort to tame inflation. However, it said that we’re likely headed into a positive economic era.
“Once the Fed takes its foot off the brakes, expect to see businesses’ investment recover and grow. As investments in artificial intelligence, green technologies, semiconductors, cloud computing, infrastructure, and domestic supply chains pick up and bear fruit, pent-up demand for labor and business inputs will be unleashed, and the 2020s will become a decade of rapid growth and innovation, like the 1920s before them,” ZipRecruiter said.