PHOENIX — This article is part of a series on Arizona’s job market.
The first in the series looked at Arizona’s growing job market and the types of jobs coming to the state.
The second part looked at the growing importance of jobs in the tech sector.
A low unemployment rate is always a sign of a healthy economy.
Today in Arizona, fewer people that want a job are unemployed than at almost any time since the government began keeping records.
According to the Labor Department’s most recent data, February’s unemployment rate for Arizona was 3.2%.
A low number by any standards, but historically low for Arizona. Only two other months in the past 50 years has unemployment reached this level: once in May 2007 and then again in December 2021.
The state’s unemployment rate has trended down consistently since the Great Recession.
Ten years ago, the unemployment rate was 8.4%. It fell to 4.5% just before the COVID-19 lockdown occurred. The lockdown caused a temporary spike to 13.3%, but it quickly fell to the historically low levels we are seeing today.
The Labor Department’s Jobs Opening and Labor Turnover Survey is a data series published monthly that can be used to look under the hood of the unemployment rate.
In February, 136,000 people in Arizona were hired, but there were 181,000 job openings.
The state also saw lower job separations of 124,000. Most of those are attributed to people who voluntarily quit their job.
Over a 10-year period, hires and openings in Arizona were mostly in balance with each other.
This continued until 2021 when job openings skyrocketed well above hirings. Today there is a gap of about 50,000 more openings than hires, a huge contributor to historically low unemployment.
The same time frame for separations shows far more people quit their jobs than were involuntarily separated or retired.
Most who quit their job will remain in the job pool.
The past year has seen a downward trend of quits meaning more people are likely now choosing to remain at their jobs.
Combine that with a discharge rate lower than it was 10 years ago and retirements not seeing any major changes and you have a recipe for historically low unemployment.
