Triangle Unemployment Rates Go Down

The effects of the recession appear to be ebbing here in the Triangle, where the jobless rate has fallen over the last few months. Wake County now has the eighth lowest unemployment rate in state, preceded by Orange County with the lowest rate and Durham just barely in second place. For a state average more than 10 percent unemployment, that is good news for this region.

For the Raleigh-Cary area, which includes Wake, Johnston, and Franklin counties, the unemployment rate was 8.3 percent in April. That is less than March’s 8.7 percent, although greater than the 3.4 percent from a year ago.

The statistics for the Durham-Chapel Hill area, which includes Durham, Orange, Chatham and Person counties, put the unemployment rate at 7.3 percent. That is higher than last year’s 3.6 percent but down from the 7.6 percent rate in March.

These rates combined yields an 8.2 percent unemployment rate. Though this rate is one of the highest in the Triangle over the past 25 years, our area is still faring much better than the state’s other two major metros (Charlotte and Greensboro-High Point-Winston-Salem).

While there were job losses in both the Raleigh-Cary and Durham-Chapel Hill metropolitan areas, mainly in manufacturing and trade, there was growth in other fields, such as information technology.

For more information on Triangle employment levels, visit thisTriangle Business Journal article.