Texas employers continued to add jobs at a solid pace in the latest numbers, marking the 26th consecutive month of job increases in the state. New figures from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) reveal that the state’s employers added 33,300 nonfarm payrolls during the month of April, a 0.2% increase over the previous month. Texas accounted for more than 13% of all the nonfarm jobs added in the nation in April.

Year-over-year, nonfarm employment in the state has increased by 4.0% compared to 2.6% at the national level.

“At a time when employers have struggled to fill positions nationally, Texas’s success continues to revolve around the expansion of its labor supply,” said Taner Osman, Research Manager at Beacon Economics. “Over the past year, the state’s workforce has grown at a much quicker rate than growth at the national level.”

Texas’s unemployment rate held steady at 4%, while nationally, the unemployment rate ticked down by one percentage point to 3.4%. However, the Texas labor force also jumped by 0.4% month-over-month, an increase of nearly 62,200. Although it’s still early in the year, growth in the state’s labor force in 2023 has been impressive having risen 1.4% since January compared to 0.5% growth at the national level. April was a weak growth month for the nation’s labor force, which contracted by 43,000 during the month.

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.