Tallahassee, Fla. — Today, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that the Fort Lauderdale area added 17,000 new private-sector jobs in the past year. The Fort Lauderdale area’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent in April, down 0.5 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 5,400 new jobs and education and health services with 5,200 new jobs.

Fort Lauderdale remains among the top four metro areas in online job demand in Florida with 31,570 openings in April. Also, the area also had the fourth-highest number of openings for high-skill, high-wage STEM occupations with 8,547 job ads.

Statewide, Florida businesses created 16,000 new private-sector jobs in April 2019. Florida’s annual private-sector job growth rate of 2.7 percent continues to exceed the nation’s rate of 2.0 percent. Florida’s unemployment rate of 3.4 percent represents a drop of 0.3 percentage point over the year. This is while 136,000 people entered Florida’s labor force, a growth of 1.3 percent in the past year.

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

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