Unemployment in Colorado has been on the rise, with another 3,400 individuals added last month for a total of 123,600 Coloradans who were unemployed in May, according to the state jobs report released Monday. That raised the state’s unemployment rate a tenth of a percentage point to 3.8%, the highest in two years.
Despite the gain, Colorado is still near record employment levels with 3.11 million employed workers in the state. And the rise is similar to what the nation’s experiencing. The U.S. jobless rate, also up a tenth of a percentage point, increased to 4%, said Joe Winter, a senior economist from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
“The state of Colorado’s slow upward trend in the unemployment rate is mostly consistent with the slow increase in the national unemployment rate, which has remained below 4.0% since December 2021,” Winter said in an email. “In fact, the national seasonally adjusted unemployment rate on an annual average basis has only been 4.0% or less in three years since 2000.”
Historically, a 3.8% unemployment rate is still pretty low. Excluding the COVID era, the last time Colorado was above 3.8% was in 2015 and toward the end of the yearslong recovery of the Great Recession, when jobless rates had hit a high of 9.4% in late 2010. Both Colorado and the U.S. rates have increased since December, when Colorado’s unemployment rate was 3.3% and the nation’s was at 3.7%.
Area economists say they are keeping an eye on the data to see if unemployed numbers continue to climb because the state still added jobs last month — another 9,800 nonfarm payroll jobs, according to state labor data.
“Job growth remained strong in May in Colorado, but the labor force pulled back from December to May by 5,700,” emailed Brian Lewandowski, executive director for the Business Research Division at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. “I believe the pullback in the labor force … should cause caution, but not alarm bells.”
Lewandowski said some of the labor reports are based on surveys with small sample sizes. Monthly job data is often revised as other data come in or employers send in their updates past the usual deadline.
Several companies in Colorado warned state officials about layoffs in May, including 103 job cuts by mortgage lender Newrez in Greenwood Village (which announced 317 more layoffs earlier this month) plus 141 at a Walmart in Aurora that is closing. In April, immersive arts company Meow Wolf announced layoffs, which cut 50 in Denver and a total of 159 in the four states it operates.
Major industries in Colorado that added jobs in May included professional and business services, plus leisure and hospitality. The business sector of accommodations and food services also saw the largest increase in May payroll jobs, adding 3,800 jobs that month. However, the arts, entertainment and recreation sectors saw the largest decline in payroll jobs for the month, at 1,700 jobs.
Around the state, unemployment rates were highest for the Pueblo metro area, at 5.2%, while the lowest was in Fort Collins, at 3.5%. Those rates were not seasonally adjusted and compared to the state’s unadjusted rate of 3.9%.