How the U.S. labor market broke and rebuilt itself, state by state — participation, openings, quits and shortages across 73 months.
← → step months · space plays · click any state for its story
About the data
A fixed snapshot of monthly state-level labor market indicators from January 2020 through January 2026 (51 jurisdictions: 50 states + DC). Counts are in thousands, seasonally adjusted. The app reads the supplied State-Grid view.csv file and does not fetch live data.
Participation rate (LFPR) — share of the civilian 16+ population working or looking for work.
“vs Feb 2020” — change versus February 2020, the last full pre-pandemic month (the dataset’s own baseline). Delta series begin in March 2020.
Job openings rate — computed here as openings ÷ (employment + openings) × 100, the JOLTS definition.
Unemployed per job opening — the dataset’s “Available Worker Ratio”. Below 1.0 means more openings than unemployed people: a labor shortage.
Quit / hire rates — quits and hires as a share of employment (JOLTS).
October 2025: observations are missing for all 51 jurisdictions in the supplied snapshot. This gap is shown without interpolation.
Static ES-module app — D3 v7 + TopoJSON from CDN, data read straight from the CSV at load. No build step.