NYC's Unemployment Actually Down From March 2019, Study Finds

NEW YORK CITY — Unemployment has been spiking across the country as businesses shutter their stores to wait out the coronavirus outbreak. Unemployment has also gone up in New York City over the past few months amid the pandemic.

However, a new study has found that the city's overall unemployment is still down compared with this time one year ago.

According to the study by WalletHub, New York City saw 3.39 percent less unemployment in March of 2020 than it did in March of 2019. The study would not have taken into account a backlog of about 400,000 people who are still waiting for their unemployment claims to be processed.

That's not to say that the city hasn't been hit by rising unemployment: it has grown 18 percent in NYC since just this January. The 3 percent year-over-year decrease simply means that enough jobs were added over the past year that, even with the recent spike, New York City has roughly the same amount of unemployment as it did this time last year.

WalletHub's study used data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to determine 2 key factors they used to rank which cities had seen the biggest jump in unemployment:

• How much unemployment had grown from March 2019 to March 2020
• How much unemployment had grown from January 2020 to March 2020

After weighing those factors the study ranked New York City as 125th city with the biggest change in unemployment. 180 total cities were studied.

The city with the largest change in unemployment, Seattle, saw the rate jump 86 percent when compared with March of last year. The bottom ranked city, Madison, Wisconsin, actually saw employment rise by more than 19 percent over the last year, and almost 25 percent growth since the outbreak started.

You can read more on the study and see WalletHub's full rankings here.