The Bay Area and California muscled up for sturdy job gains in January to kick off 2024 — but the employment markets in the nine-county region and statewide were not nearly as strong in 2023 as first thought.
Employers in the Bay Area added 13,600 jobs in January, marking five straight months of job gains for the region, according to seasonally adjusted numbers released Friday by the state’s labor agency.
Here is how the Bay Area’s three largest urban centers fared to start 2024, as reported by the state Employment Development Department:
— The South Bay provided the most propulsion for the surge in hiring to launch the year, adding 5,000 jobs in January.
— The San Francisco-San Mateo region added 3,400 jobs in January.
— The East Bay gained 2,200 jobs in January. All of the regional metro numbers were also adjusted for seasonal variations.
California added 58,100 jobs in January, the EDD reported.
The statewide unemployment rate worsened to 5.2%, up from 5.1% in December. The current jobless levels in California are far higher than the record-low unemployment rate of 3.8% that occurred in August 2022.
The new jobs report, however, contained an ominous set of disclosures, as a result of the EDD’s annual revision of previous estimates for monthly job totals in California and all of its metro regions, including the Bay Area.
It turns out that the Bay Area job market was not nearly as much of a hiring machine in 2023 as initially thought, producing 57,500 fewer jobs than first thought.
In the original estimates, the EDD had guessed that the Bay Area had added 62,100 jobs in 2023 — but it turns out the gain was only 4,600 more jobs last year.
Similarly, California’s job market was nowhere as strong in 2023 compared to the first estimates. The state wound up producing 156,100 fewer jobs than the EDD originally reported.
The EDD originally reckoned that California had added 311,000 jobs in 2023. The revised estimate for 2023 is now a gain of just 154,900 jobs.