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03.11.24
In March of each year, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes revised historical data on unemployment and job growth for every state in the nation, including North Carolina. These revisions, which incorporate new information that wasn’t available when the data were first reported, provide a more accurate depiction of how the economy performed last year and offer more clarity about where we might be headed in the year to come.
This year’s revisions had relatively little impact on North Carolina’s unemployment rate, which ended 2023 at 3.6% in the revised data, compared to 3.5% in the preliminary estimates. The revisions to North Carolina’s job growth estimates were more notable. As we’ve emphasized in recent months, employers in our state are still hiring, but they’ve been adding jobs at a slower pace than during the economic boomtimes of 2021 and 2022. Data revisions reveal that this employment slowdown has been even steeper than we initially thought: while preliminary estimates showed over-the-year job growth slowing from 3.8% in January 2023 to 2.0% in December 2023, the revised data show us starting the year at 4.3% and ending the year at 1.8%.
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