Jacksonville's unemployment rate dropped sharply in June as Florida went to phase 2 of its reopening plan during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The jobless rate in the Jacksonville metropolitan area of Duval, Baker, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns counties fell from a revised 10.4% in May to 8% in June, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity reported July 17.
The state agency originally reported the May rate at 11.2%, unchanged from April, which was the highest jobless rate in 10 years.
Nonfarm businesses added 13,100 jobs to their payrolls last month, but the number of jobs remained 27,000 below the level of June 2019, a 3.4% decline.
Jacksonville's unemployment rate in June 2019 was 3.4%.
Florida's unemployment rate dropped by 3.3 percentage points to a seasonally adjusted 10.4% in June. The Department of Economic Opportunity does not provide seasonally adjusted data for the Jacksonville metropolitan area.
The surveys of unemployment are taken in the middle of every month, so the June data was gathered before the number of reported COVID cases began surging in Florida.
The U.S. Department of Labor reported July 16 that new claims for unemployment insurance in Florida nearly doubled to 129,408 for the week ending July 11, from 66,941 the previous week.
That was the highest level since new weekly claims topped 200,000 at the end of May.