Job growth is bumpy in number and lopsided in location

On Vermont’s jobs front May was a down month in a year of ups and downs. The number of nonfarm payroll jobs fell by 500 last month, after increasing by 600 in April. Employers reported 314,600 nonfarm jobs in May—1,400 more than last May. Meanwhile, Vermont’s unemployment rate remained at 2.8 percent in May.

Top spot
Four out of 10 nonfarm payroll jobs are located in
northwest Vermont—Chittenden County and some towns in Franklin, Grand Isle, and Addison counties that make up the Burlington-South Burlington New England City and Town Area (NECTA) of the U.S. Census. ¹ Of Vermont’s 314,100 payroll jobs in 2017, this area claimed 125,000. The share of Vermont jobs in the NECTA was slightly higher than the share of Vermonters who live there: 40 percent of the jobs, versus 35 percent of the population. That’s because the job total includes workers from outside the counties.

These jobs also comprised more than seven in 10 of the 16,900 new jobs created since the end of the recession in 2009. And while the area netted 9,200 additional jobs from 2007—before the recession—to 2017, the rest of the state lost 3,500.

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1. The New England City and Town Areas (NECTAs) are delineated using the same criteria as metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, based respectively on the presence of either an urbanized area of 50,000 or more population or an urban cluster of at least 10,000 but less than 50,000 population. To view the towns included in the Burlington-South Burlington NECTA, go to https://www2.census.gov/geo/maps/metroarea/us_wall/Jul2015/necta_0715.pdf[↩]