Missouri’s Unemployment Rate Increases Slightly

Missouri’s unemployment rate increased slightly in June when compared to May. June’s unemployment figure rose from 4.2 to 4.3 percent, but that rate is still 3.8 percentage points lower than the June 2020 rate. Missouri’s lowest unemployment rate in the months just prior to the pandemic was 3.1 percent. It was 3.8 percent in March of 2020. The rate spiked at 12.5 percent in April of 2020 before decreasing for the rest of 2020. The increase of two-tenths of a percentage point over the last two months appears to be related to a temporary shortage in the supply of semiconductor chips, which caused production slowdowns.

Due to benchmark revisions, Missouri’s unemployment rate rose a tenth of a percentage point higher than the national rate in January and February of 2020, but has been below the national rate for every month since February 2020. The national unemployment rate increased from 5.8 percent in May 2021 to 5.9 percent in June 2021. The estimated number of unemployed Missourians was 133,380 in June 2021, up by 4,343 from May’s 129,037.