Kentucky seems to have recovered all the jobs that were lost over the course of the pandemic. August unemployment data show that joblessness rates fell in 111 counties since August of 2021.
Michael Clark is Director for the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Kentucky. He said there’s some variation month to month, but generally, the number of jobs has been going up.
“August was actually the first month where we saw an indication that employment had actually returned to pre-pandemic levels. In fact, August was above the January 2020 employment levels,” said Clark.
A survey of businesses in the commonwealth shows 26,700 more jobs in August than there were in July.
“So, that’s a 1.4 percent increase. That’s a pretty substantial increase and we’ve been seeing those numbers grow continually since we’ve been recovering from the pandemic,” said Clark.
Oldham County had the lowest unemployment rate in August at 2.6 percent. Magoffin County had the highest jobless rate at 11.7 percent.
Magoffin was followed by Martin, Breathitt, Elliott, Carter, Leslie, Owsley, Lewis, Harlan, and Knott counties. Data comes from the Kentucky Center for Statistics.
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