The Missouri labor market’s recovery resumed in September.

According to the Missouri Jobs Report, employment, seasonally adjusted, increased by 13,000 jobs over the month, and over-the-year job losses from COVID-19 shutdowns dropped below 125,000. Missouri’s smoothed seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate went down by 2.1 percentage points in September, decreasing to 4.9 percent from August.

Missouri’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate has now been either below or equal to the national rate for 67 consecutive months. The national unemployment rate was 7.9 percent in September.

The estimated number of unemployed Missourians was 146,051 in September, down by 68,345 from August’s 214,396. The over-the-month drop is due in part to the unemployed workers exhausting their Unemployment Insurance benefits and leaving the labor market. The change contributed to the 2.3 percent decline in Missouri’s total civilian labor force over the month.

Due to lingering layoffs from COVID-19 shutdowns, the September 2020 rate was still nearly 50 percent higher than the September 2019 rate.

The state’s not-seasonally-adjusted rate was 4.3 percent in September, down by 2.8 percentage points from the August not-seasonally-adjusted rate of 7.1 percent. The corresponding not-seasonally-adjusted national rate for September 2020 was 7.7 percent.

A year ago, the state’s seasonally adjusted rate was 3.3 percent, and the not-adjusted rate was 2.7 percent.