Virginia Unemployment - Equity at a Glance

Usability and Accessibility: The dashboard below includes information regarding unemployment levels for Virginia. Use the navigation menu on the left side panel to access the dashboard and information for other topic areas at the Virginia or Locality level. The dashboards include text captions for charts and tables that are accessible to screen readers. For each chart or table, you can also access the underlying data by clicking on the links in the Data and Documentation section. For more information on measure definitions, data sources, and data notes, see the collapsible sections below each dashboard.

Metric Descriptions

Metric	Description	Source	Data Published
Virginia Unemployment National Ranking	The rank is calculated by sorting the unadjusted unemployment rate for all of the United States (including the District of Columbia) from least to greatest. The closer to 1, the better Virginia is doing as compared to the other states. See the Data Notes below for more information on the unadjusted unemployment rate.	Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)	April 2021
Unemployment Rate	The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed. People are considered unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. Early each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) of the U.S. Department of Labor announces the total number of employed and unemployed people in the United States for the previous month.	Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)	April 2021
Net Change in Unemployment Over the Last 12 Months	The net change in employment is the difference between the unemployment rate for the most recent month of available data and the unemployment rate 12 months ago.	Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)	April 2021
Labor Force Participation	The civilian labor force is made up of all people in the civilian noninstitutional population ages 16 and older classified as either employed or unemployed. The labor force participation percentage is the labor force as a percent of the civilian noninstitutional population.	Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)	April 2021

Data Notes

Notes	Description
Unemployment rate not seasonally adjusted	All unemployment rate data is not seasonally adjusted. Without seasonal adjustment, the unemployment rate does not remove the effects of recurring seasonal influences from economic series. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only reports the unadjusted unemployment rate at the locality level; in order to stay consistent across all unemployment metrics, the unadjusted rate is used for state and national level unemployment as well. See BLS website for more details.
Unemployment by Race/Ethnicity	The unemployment rate estimates in the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) report are based on the Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The overall state unemployment rate is taken directly from the LAUS. CPS six-month ratios are applied to LAUS data to calculate the rates by race and ethnicity. For each state subgroup, EPI calculated the unemployment rate using the past six months of CPS data. The ratio of this subgroup rate to the state unemployment rate is found using the same period of CPS data. This gives an estimate of how the subgroup compares with the state overall. While this methodology allows calculating unemployment-rate estimates at the state level by race/ethnicity by quarter, it is less precise at the national level than simply using the CPS. Thus, the national-level estimates may differ from direct CPS estimates. In many states, the sample sizes of particular subgroups are not large enough to create accurate estimates of their unemployment rates. EPI reports data only for groups that had, on average, a sample size of at least 700 in the labor force for each six-month period. See the EPI website for more details.
Rural and Non-Rural Designations	Virginia counties/cities that are not designated as parts of Office of Management and Budget Metropolitan Areas (MAs) are considered rural. For more information about rural and non-rural designations, visit the VDH website.