The Nebraska Department of Labor (NDOL) announced today that Nebraska’s preliminary unemployment rate for January was 2.9 percent, seasonally adjusted. The rate was down 0.1 percentage points from the revised December 2019 rate of 3.0 percent and is down 0.1 percentage points from the January 2019 rate of 3.0 percent.

“The state’s total labor force and number of employed workers in the labor force were both up over the month and over the year in January,” said Commissioner of Labor John H. Albin. “There were normal seasonal declines in some industries.”

Nonfarm employment for January 2020 was 1,020,166, down by 17,135 over the month. Benchmarked nonfarm employment data will be published on March 27, at which time comparisons to 2019 data will be available.

The national seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for January was 3.6 percent, up 0.1 percentage points from the December 2019 rate of 3.5 percent and down 0.4 percentage points from the January 2019 rate of 4.0 percent.

February 2020 Nebraska data will be published Friday, March 27, 2020. December 2019 and January 2019 unemployment data is provided for comparison purposes only. Statewide and substate 2018 and 2019 benchmarked data will be published on Friday, April 17. Benchmarking is the annual process of aligning estimated data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program with known employment numbers from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) program. It is a necessary step in ensuring the data released by the NDOL is of the highest quality. For more January 2020 data, go to dol.nebraska.gov/InfoLink.

Nonfarm employment data can be found at NEworks.nebraska.gov/CES and Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) data can be found at NEworks.nebraska.gov/LAUS.