Cities with the Biggest Increases in Unemployment Rates Due to COVID-19

From Wallet Hub, June 3, 2020

It’s hard to overstate just how disastrous the COVID-19 pandemic has been for U.S. employment. In total, the country has lost nearly 41 million jobs, wiping out years of gains since the last big economic crisis, the Great Recession. To put that number in perspective, it’s 25% of all adults in the workforce. While cities across the country have begun to reopen certain businesses in accordance with their states’ guidelines, it will likely take a long time for the unemployment rate to return to the historic low it experienced prior to the coronavirus crisis. Some cities’ jobs have weathered the storm better than others, though.

In order to identify where workers have been most affected by the coronavirus pandemic, WalletHub compared 180 cities based on three key metrics. They looked at the change in each city’s unemployment rate during the latest month for which we have data (April 2020) compared to April 2019 and January 2020. They also considered each city’s overall unemployment rate….

Please note that this report relies on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which recently disclosed that it misclassified many workers on temporary layoffs as “absent from work because of other reasons” rather than “unemployed.” Therefore, the real unemployment rate may be around 33 percent higher than reported. For this reason, WalletHub has included two columns for the unemployment rate in the table below, one with the officially reported unemployment rate and one with the “adjusted” rate after accounting for the misclassification....

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