Florida rate dips again to 4.6% in October

State regains 86% of jobs lost between February and April ’20

TALLAHASSEE — Florida’s jobless rate dropped to 4.6% in October, with a state economist saying the dip shows more people are getting back in the labor force during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The October rate was down from 4.8% in September and represented an estimated 491,000 Floridians being out of work in mid-October from a labor force that grew by 29,000 to 10.59 million, according to a report released Friday by the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

In Central Florida, the jobless rate for the Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford metro area held steady from September at 4.4%.

The total number of unemployed Floridians was down from 506,000 in mid-September.

The report also indicated that Florida has regained 86.6% of the 1.27 million jobs lost between February and April 2020, a period when businesses had to shut down or dramatically scale back because of the pandemic.

The largest number of returning jobs have been in the fields hit hardest by the pandemic, leisure and hospitality, with an increase of 135,100 over the past year.

Adrienne Johnston, the Department of Economic Opportunity’s chief economist, pointed to “continued positive growth.” Florida’s unemployment rate matched the national rate of 4.6% in October.

“We try not to make too many predictions based on what we see at the national level because the estimates are done for Florida, independent of that,” Johnston told reporters in a conference call Friday. “I think we’re confident that this is a good report. We’re still seeing job gains consistently, and seeing that coupled with the labor force increasing at the same time.”

Since mid-May, the state has pushed to get Floridians back into the labor force, including by withdrawing early from two federal assistance programs and reinstating a work search requirement for people seeking unemployment benefits.

In that time, Florida has seen an average of 7,696 new unemployment claims a week. The weekly average across the pre-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019 was 6,535.

State officials have bemoaned struggles by service-related businesses in refilling positions and repeatedly pointed to around a half-million online postings across the state. But at least some workers in Florida and across the nation appear to have used the pandemic to seek better jobs.

The U.S. Department of Labor reported 4.4 million Americans left jobs in September, simply quitting or finding new employment.

The state and national unemployment rates have declined after a summer surge of COVID19 cases linked to the highly contagious delta variant of the coronavirus.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that an estimated 268,000 first-time jobless claims were filed nationally during the week that ended Nov. 13, marking the seventh straight week of declines in applications.