Texas employment is growing faster than the rest of the nation, data from the Texas Workforce Commission shows.
Texas saw a 3% job growth in November compared to the same month last year. According to the commission, the national job growth rate was at about 1.8% in the last month.
Bryan Daniel is the chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission and said the growth is coming because of the quality of life of large cities in the state.
"Austin, San Antonio, of course, Dallas and Houston, Fort Worth and all of the surrounding suburbs, all those communities have a high quality of life, good schools," Daniel said. "There's a lot of things going on here that attract the workforce."
Daniel said rural areas of the state are not seeing the same growth that larger cities are.
Mariana Vega is a director at the Texas Workforce Commission and said the areas with growth are happening across various industries.
"I think we just have a diverse economy that's growing," she said. "New businesses are coming to Texas, we're adding population.”
Vega said current growth statewide is comparable to pre-pandemic levels in 2019. This is the 11th consecutive monthly increase of employed Texans. A record 14 million people are working in Texas.
The statewide unemployment rate has remained at 4.1%.
"4.1% is a pretty low unemployment rate," Vega said. "And one of the things that contributes to that considerably low unemployment rate is that we keep adding to the workforce."
In the Houston area, about60,000 jobs will be coming in 2024according to the Greater Houston Partnership. Patrick Jankowski with the partnership said on Houston Matters that more jobs have been created in the past 42 months than there would normally be created in a decade.
"Coming out of the pandemic when after we had shut down and everybody wanted to do something, we were (Olympic sprinter) Usain Bold. We were out of the blocks going as fast as we can," he said at the time. "We can't maintain that pace forever. We have to find a pace that we can maintain."
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