STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS Dallas Morning News | TNS

Texas job growth slowed from February to March while unemployment held steady at 4%, figures released Friday by the Texas Workforce Commission show.

The Valley’s two metropolitan statistical areas both reported numbers above the state average. Brownsville- Harlingen was at 5.9% and McAllen-Edinburg-Mission at 6.4%.

The state added more than 28,600 positions in March, a 51% decline in job growth compared with February, according to the TWC’s latest report.

This continues more than two years of uninterrupted monthly job growth in Texas.

“The state’s private industries are booming,” said TWC Commissioner Aaron Demerson.

The U.S. unemployment rate was 3.6% during the month.

Despite the slowdown in monthly growth, the size of Texas’ labor force and the number of people employed in the state still broke records last month, the TWC said.

Texas has added 575,100 jobs over the last 12 months. The state’s employment growth from March 2022 to 2023 outpaced the nation in all 11 major industries, the TWC said.

“The promise of Texas knows no bounds,” Gov. Greg Abbott said. “With more Texans working today than ever before, we are building an even greater Texas of tomorrow.”

Daniel Oney, research director for the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A& M University, said the job growth reported by the TWC isn’t significant enough to say that job growth was up dramatically, but the fact it wasn’t down is a good sign.

Population growth and migration continue to bring demand for goods and services that creates jobs, he said. The center’s economists don’t expect a hard recession in Texas, but instead more of a soft landing.

“We’re right there at the top on a lot of these metrics, and we’ll start seeing some of them get worse a little bit over the year,” Oney said. “I still expect Texas to perform better than the country in terms of employment.”

Texas had more than 13.8 million nonagricultural workers in March. Employment rose from February to March in all sectors except for financial, professional and information services. Those two job categories shed 7,400 positions combined as the mortgage and technology sectors have faced broad economic uncertainty.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area added 9,100 nonfarmjobs from February to March, a 5.1% increase from a year before. Jay Denton, chief analytics officer for compensation software firm LaborIQ, said the new numbers suggest a slowdown from the strong economic activity of the last couple of years.

“From a historical perspective, and given everything happening in the market, that would still be a really incredible number,” Denton said.

Job Postings Decline

Job postings on the Indeed website have declined across all the major Texas metros from the start of the year to March, suggesting that demand for workers has slowed, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Uncertainty about the state’s economic outlook in March was heightened due to stress in the banking sector and tightening financial conditions, Dallas Fed researchers said in a report last month.

The Dallas Fed researchers said there were few signs of relief on inflation as price and wage pressures remain elevated, particularly in the service sector.

Employers are thinking through and slowing down their hiring plans, Denton said, though he added hiring is still strong compared to historical levels.

“Nationally, companies are being a bit more cautious than they were, compared to the couple years right after the pandemic, where everyone was trying to capture so much demand that was out there in the market,” he said.

Many small- and medium- sized businesses that still have open jobs are finding it easier to fill those roles with less competition in the market, Denton said.

“We still have a lot of people moving here, our talent base is growing, and there are plenty of businesses that are still optimistic and actually more in hiring mode,” he said.

The state’s civilian labor force grew by 72,600 during the month, TWC data shows.