Just over 4 percent of the Nashville region’s workforce lacked a job in April, the lowest unemployment rate among the state’s 10 metropolitan areas and a decline of about half a percentage point compared to a year earlier, federal figures released on Wednesday show.
Nashville’s preliminary April 2015 unemployment rate stood at 4.2 percent, down from 4.6 percent in April 2014 and well below the national figure of 5.1 percent unemployment.
The Knoxville area posted a 4.9 percent unemployment rate, the next-lowest in the state. The Memphis area’s 5.9 percent unemployment ranked highest. Unemployment declined across all 10 of the state’s metro areas compared to April of last year, with the largest drop appearing in the Clarksville, where unemployment fell from 6.4 percent in April of last year to 5.4 percent this April.
Nationwide, Nashville’s unemployment rate was identical to that of six other metro areas: Chambersburg-Waynesboro, Pennsylvania; Denver, Colorado; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Kalamazoo, Michigan; Owensboro, Kentucky; and Santa Rosa, California. The lowest unemployment rate among all U.S. metro areas was Lincoln, Nebraska’s 2.1 percent rate. The highest was 22.2 percent in Yuma, Arizona.
The Nashville metropolitan area includes Murfreesboro and Franklin. The data were released June 3 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Here are the figures for all metro areas in the U.S.