WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Today, Governor Rick Scott announced that the West Palm Beach area created an additional 7,900 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The area’s unemployment rate was 4.0 percent in July, down 0.4 percentage point in the past year. Statewide, Florida businesses created 26,300 new jobs in July bringing the total number of new private-sector jobs created in Florida to nearly 1.6 million since December 2010.

To see the statewide job creation information, click here.

The industries with the highest growth over the year in West Palm Beach were construction and leisure and hospitality, each with 3,500 new jobs. In July, the West Palm Beach area had 16,322 job openings and of those, 4,790 were for high-skill, high-wage STEM jobs in July.

As of July, Florida’s unemployment rate remained at a low of 3.7 percent, a drop of 7.1 percentage points since December 2010. This drop in unemployment is faster than the national decline of 5.4 percentage points. In the past year, 132,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.3 percent, which is greater than the national labor force growth rate of 1.1 percent.

To view the July 2018 employment data visit www.floridajobs.org/labor-market-information/labor-market-information-press-releases/monthly-press-releases.

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