Dozens of Questions: Why is the unemployment rate in Nevada so high?
Since 2020, Nevada’s unemployment rate has been significantly higher than the national average, even as tourism has recovered
by MAYA CHARI | May 21, 2025
Editor’s note: We recently collaborated with Marketplace to create “The Marketplace Dozen,” a dashboard of key economic indicators that provides a quick read on the health of the economy. Naturally, the data raises almost as many questions as it answers. Our Ten Across data journalism fellow, Maya Chari, who is also the chief technical architect of the Dozen, set out to answer some of them.
As of April 2025, Nevada has the highest unemployment rate of any of the 50 states: 5.6% compared to the national average of 4.2%. (Unemployment is slightly higher — 5.8% — in Washington, DC.) It’s one of just a few states with a significantly higher unemployment rate than the national average. Clark County, which houses the city of Las Vegas and 70% of the state’s population, had an unemployment rate of 5.6% as of March 2025.
The state’s tourism-heavy economy was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. That’s especially true of southern Nevada, where Vegas is. In April 2020, 1 in 3 Clark County workers was seeking employment. Yet the unemployment rate remained relatively high even as Las Vegas tourism rebounded to roughly 2019 levels in early 2023.
“What’s happened in Las Vegas after the pandemic is that there’s restructuring going on in the labor market,” said Stephen Miller, professor of economics and director of research at the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
According to Miller, Nevada is experiencing high levels of structural unemployment, which tends to occur when workers move from one sector of the economy to another — usually from one with a labor surplus to one with a labor shortage.
Seeking better wages and conditions, workers in the state are moving from leisure and hospitality into sectors like trade, transportation and utilities, healthcare and education. Extra unemployment benefits provided by the federal government during the early pandemic eased the financial burden on hospitality workers who had lost their jobs, allowing them time and flexibility to potentially change careers.
That restructuring is still ongoing, which is why the unemployment rate hasn’t yet returned to pre-pandemic levels. But Miller expects unemployment to moderate in the coming months and years as southern Nevada completes the shift toward a more diverse economy.
Methodological note: Unemployment rates are based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, while employment rates are sourced from BLS Current Employment Statistics. BLS state-level unemployment rates, which are based on large governmental surveys, are estimates. Nevada is one of six states that has a significantly higher unemployment rate than the national average with 90% confidence, according to the confidence intervals provided by BLS here for March 2025 data.