Nebraska and North Dakota have lowest jobless rates in February 2015

Nebraska and North Dakota had the lowest unemployment rates among the states in February, 2.7 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively. The national jobless rate was 5.5 percent in February, the same as Arkansas, Maryland, and Missouri. The states with the highest rates were Mississippi (7.0 percent) and Nevada (7.1 percent). The District of Columbia had a rate of 7.8 percent.

From February 2014 to February 2015, 42 states had statistically significant unemployment rate declines; the largest were in Kentucky and Rhode Island (-2.1 percentage points each). In Kentucky, the rate declined from 7.3 percent to 5.2 percent. In Rhode Island, it declined from 8.4 percent to 6.3 percent. Illinois and Michigan both had notable over-the-year unemployment rate decreases (-1.9 percentage points each).

Three states had statistically significant over-the-year jobless rate increases. In Louisiana, the rate rose 1.3 percentage points, from 5.4 percent to 6.7 percent. The rate rose by 0.5 percentage point in South Carolina and by 0.2 percentage point in North Dakota. The remaining 5 states and the District of Columbia had rates that were not much different from a year earlier. The national unemployment rate was 1.2 percentage points lower than a year earlier.

In Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming, the number of unemployed was less than 25,000 in February. In Florida, New York, and Texas there were more than 500,000, and in California, over 1.2 million.

These data are from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics program. To learn more, see "Regional and State Employment and Unemployment — February 2015" (HTML) (PDF).