Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development

Missouri non-farm payroll employment showed little overall change from March 2021 to April 2021, and the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased by a tenth of a percentage point. Employment, seasonally adjusted, increased by 600 jobs over the month. The state’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 4.1 percent in April 2021, down from 4.2 percent in March 2021. The Missouri labor market showed an increase of nearly a quarter million jobs from April 2020 to April 2021.

UNEMPLOYMENT

Missouri’s smoothed seasonally adjusted unemployment rate decreased by a tenth of a percentage point in April 2021, dropping to 4.1 percent from the March 2021 rate of 4.2 percent. With the start of the COVID-19 pandemic now a year in the past, the April 2021 rate was 8.4 percentage points lower than the April 2020 rate. The rate had reached a low of 3.1 percent starting in July 2018, before gradually edging up to 3.5 percent by the end of 2019, and then to 3.7 percent in March 2020. The COVID-19 effect hit in April 2020, spiking the rate to 12.5 percent for that month. The rate decreased monthly for the rest of 2020, reaching 4.4 percent in December, and has continued gradually downward through the first four months of 2021. Missouri’s unemployment rate has been below the national rate for every month since February 2020. The national unemployment rate increased from 6.0 percent in March 2021 to 6.1 percent in April 2021.

The estimated number of unemployed Missourians was 126,758 in April 2021, down by 1,303 from March’s 128,061.

Improved weather and the gradual return to a post-COVID economy helped to push the state’s not-seasonally-adjusted rate down to 4.0 percent in April 2021, four-tenths of a percentage point lower than the March 2021 not-seasonally-adjusted rate of 4.4 percent. The corresponding not-seasonally-adjusted national rate for April 2021 was 5.7 percent.  

A year ago, the state’s seasonally adjusted rate was 12.5 percent, and the not-adjusted rate was 12.3 percent.

Read the full report at https://meric.mo.gov/missouri-monthly-jobs-report.