All but one county in the listening area ended 2022 with unemployment rates more than a half-point below where they were a year ago. This (Tuesday) morning, Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) released the county-by-county unemployment figures for December. Audubon County recorded the lowest rate in the region at 1.9 percent, a 0.5-point decrease from November and 0.8 points lower than in 2021. Carroll and Greene Counties followed close behind at 2.0 percent, 0.2 points lower than the prior month. Sac County recorded a 2.4 percent unemployment rate, unchanged from November, while Calhoun saw a 0.1-point decrease to 2.7 percent. Guthrie County climbed 0.2 points to 3.1 percent. Crawford County saw a significant spike in unemployment in December, jumping to 6.1 percent from 3.3 percent the previous month. Audubon and Greene Counties saw the most improvement over the year with a 0.8-point reduction in unemployment. Crawford County was the only county to see an increase from December 2021 to December 2022. Iowa’s unemployment rate for December stood at 3.1 percent, and the national rate was 3.5 percent. A link to the IWD’s full dataset is included below.
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https://www.iowaworkforcedevelopment.gov/local-area-unemployment-statistics