Texas Jobs Continue to Grow

Texas added 50,000 jobs in December 2021, a 0.4 percent increase over November and the 19^th month out of the last 20 that the state has added jobs, according to the Texas Real Estate Research Center. The 0.4 percent increase in jobs quadrupled the nation’s growth rate.

Texas has recovered all jobs (in terms of numbers) lost during the shutdown and now has 89,600 jobs more than in February 2020.

The unemployment rate in Texas dropped 0.2 percent from the previous month to a 5-percent unemployment rate in December. This was higher than the nation’s unemployment rate, which was 3.9 percent. The labor force for the state increased 45,334 from November 2021 to December 2021.

There also have been record job openings. In November, Texas had 884,000 job openings. In July, the state reached a record of 928,000 job openings. For the fifth straight month, job openings are higher than the number of unemployed people. The Research Center suggest that childcare, lingering COVID concerns, early retirement, and people re-thinking their career paths could be “affecting the transition from unemployment to employment.”

From December 2020 to December 2021, Austin-Round Rock had the highest annual jobs growth rate of Texas’ four major MSAs. In addition to Austin-Round Rock, the MSAs of Abilene, Amarillo, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, Killeen-Temple, Lubbock, McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Sherman-Denison, Tyler, and Waco are the only metropolitan areas to have recovered all of the jobs they lost during shutdowns.

The Texas labor force participation rate, which reached a trough in the second quarter of 2021, has been slowly increasing and reached 62.7 percent in December 2021.