Virginia saw 15,000 jobs created in June

Virginia reported 15,000 jobs created in June, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Friday.

Overall, the commonwealth has seen 258,000 jobs created since January 2022, according to the news release from the governor’s office.

“The jobs report is yet another good sign about the resiliency of the Virginia economy,” Bob McNab, an economist at Old Dominion University, told Virginia Business Tuesday.

For the announcement, the state government relied partially on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics (CES) Survey, which provides a job count based on payroll information.

“One thing governors like to do is they like to focus on job announcements versus job creation,” McNab said. “Job announcements are great because they are a signal that companies are creating jobs. But the truth really lies in the data — that is, what are companies reporting in terms of the jobs they have on hand?”

Virginia’s unemployment rate for June remained at 2.7%, significantly below the 4.1% national rate. And that “continues to show that Virginia is well-poised to grow in 2025, in my opinion,” McNab said.

The BLS’ household survey is based on interviews conducted each month for the Bureau of Labor Statistics and provides comprehensive data on the labor force. It found the number of employed residents in Virginia, 4.45 million, decreased slightly by 1,786 workers from May to June. Virginia’s labor force decreased by 4,155 from May to 4.57 million. The labor force participation rate — the proportion of adults age 16 and older that are employed or actively looking for work— decreased by 2,369, from 124,764 adults in May to 122,395 in June.

“This is the long-term challenge for the commonwealth … getting people off the sidelines into the labor market … [and] looking at policies that will increase labor force participation,” McNab said. “Because if we can get labor force participation up, then employers can expand operations, which we know they want to do.”

CNBC crowned Virginia as America’s Top State for Business for a record sixth year in July. The cable business news network praised Virginia for having “the nation’s best education system and policies that give companies room — both literally and figuratively — to grow.”

The commonwealth, McNab said, has “really leaned into the idea that being a business-friendly state is more than just, for example, cutting taxes. It is investing in infrastructure, investing in education and it is providing a climate that is friendly to business to relocate here, where you have a deep talent pool that businesses can leverage to expand their operations and succeed.”

The job openings rate for April in Virginia was 6.8%, a drop from 7.3% in April 2023. If you jump back to April 2018, before the pandemic, however, Virginia’s job openings rate was 5.4%.

“If  you look at it at the state level, you can tell two stories,” McNab said. “The first story is that the jobs market appears to be weakening, because compared to 2022, there are fewer job openings across the commonwealth. On the other hand, if you compare the most recent data on job openings to prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are at or near a record level of job openings compared to pre-pandemic lows.”

While this is good news for workers, who are in a position to demand higher compensation, it’s a challenge for employers, McNab pointed out.

“Because if you have an unemployment rate that is at 2.7%, for the commonwealth, and less than that in several metro areas,” McNab said, “it really says that we could have higher rates of job growth if we had greater amounts of labor available.”

Overall, however, McNab described the state’s jobs numbers as strong and said they “represent a positive signal on the policies of the last three years in terms of job creation. … Usually I’m not this positive, but this is a really good jobs report.”