Payrolls have continued to expand in Texas. The latest figures released by the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) reveal that the state’s employers hired an additional 30,100 workers during March.

The state’s unemployment rate fell to 4.4% in the latest numbers, a 0.3 percentage-point decline from the previous month. Texas’s unemployment rate remains elevated relative to the 3.6% rate in the United States overall, however, Texas’s labor force increased by nearly 41,000 during March and has grown by 3.3% since February 2020. By comparison, the United States’ labor force has not fully recovered compared to pre-pandemic levels.

There are now 241,400 more people employed in Texas than there were pre-pandemic, an increase of 1.9%. This represents a significant outperformance compared to the nation as a whole, where there are still 1.0% fewer jobs relative to the pre-pandemic peak. Lastly, every major industry in Texas has seen an increase in payrolls over the year.

“Having fully recovered all of the jobs lost during the pandemic, the key constraint to growth in the coming months could be macro headwinds, as inflation tightens conditions for consumers,” said Taner Osman, Research Manager at Beacon Economics. “But with Texas virtually at full employment, the fundamentals for the state’s economy are strong.”

The Beacon Employment Report | Texas is a unique analysis of Texas’ employment numbers and trends. Each month, we link our own econometric predictions to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Labor Market Information Division of the Texas Workforce Commission to identify important changes in employment across industries and regions. The Beacon Employment Report is also one of the few analyses that uses seasonally adjusted numbers, which are critical to revealing accurate trends and insights within data. The analysis is a sample of the kind of research available from Beacon Economics.