WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Today, Governor Rick Scott announced that the West Palm Beach area had an increase of 5,800 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The area’s unemployment rate was 3.9 percent in August, down 0.5 percentage point in the past year. Statewide, Florida businesses created 20,000 new jobs in August bringing the total number of new private-sector jobs created in Florida to 1,615,500 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 with 3,800 and leisure and hospitality with 3,700 new jobs. In August, the West Palm Beach area had 17,958 job openings and of those, 4,961 were for high-skill, high-wage STEM jobs in August.

As of August, Florida’s unemployment rate remained at a low of 3.7 percent, a drop of 7.1 percentage points since December 2010; this drop is faster than the national decline of 5.4 percentage points. In the past year, 121,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.2 percent, which nearly doubled the national labor force growth rate of 0.7 percent.

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

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