Tallahassee, Fla. — Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that the Fort Lauderdale area added 12,900 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The Fort Lauderdale area’s unemployment rate was 3.1 percent in March, down 0.4 percentage point from one year ago.

The industries with the highest growth over the year in the Fort Lauderdale area were professional and business services with 4,500 new jobs and education and health services with 4,200 new jobs.

Fort Lauderdale remains among the top four metro areas in online job demand in Florida with 30,100 openings in March. Also, the area had the fifth-highest number of openings for high-skill, high-wage STEM occupations with 7,488 job ads.

Statewide, Florida businesses created 12,600 new private-sector jobs in March 2019. Florida’s annual private-sector job growth rate of 2.7 percent continues to exceed the nation’s rate of 1.9 percent. Florida’s unemployment rate of 3.5 percent represents a drop of 0.3 percentage point over the year. This is while 158,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.6 percent in the past year.

To view the March 2019 employment data, visit www.floridajobs.org/labor-market-information/labor-market-information-press-releases/monthly-press-releases.

###