The greater Dallas-Fort Worth region’s unemployment rate ticked up slightly last month, even as the national unemployment rate dropped, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Nearly 20,000 more people in North Texas were added to unemployment rolls between July and August, bringing the total to just under 200,000, state and federal data shows.
Last month, in non-seasonally adjusted terms, Dallas-Fort Worth counted a labor force of around 4.6 million workers, with about 4.4 million workers currently employed, giving the region a 4.4% unemployment rate, according to a report compiled by the BLS and the Texas Workforce Commission.
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That unemployment rate was four-tenths of a percentage point higher than the region saw in July, when it counted around 180,000 unemployed workers. It was also slightly higher than the region’s unemployment rate in August 2024, when BLS data showed D-FW had around 190,000 unemployed workers and an unemployment rate of 4.2%
D-FW’s most recent unemployment figure was still narrowly below the country’s overall figure — the same dataset showed that last month the United States as a whole had a 4.5% jobless rate — although the national rate actually fell a tenth of a percentage point compared to July. A year earlier, in August 2024, the national rate was 4.4%.
Within North Texas, the Dallas and Fort Worth areas followed similar trend lines, with Dallas-Plano-Irving moving from a 4% unemployment rate in July to a 4.4% rate last month and Fort Worth-Arlington-Grapevine moving from a 3.9% rate in July to a 4.3% rate.
Other major Texas metro areas, including greater Austin, Houston and San Antonio, also registered similar non-adjusted unemployment increases compared to both July 2025 and August 2024.
Additional preliminary BLS data shows that, in year-over-year terms, the total number of D-FW nonfarm jobs notched up by 0.6%, with manufacturing jobs falling slightly and education and health services and government jobs recording a notable increase.
In seasonally adjusted terms, Texas recorded almost 200,000 more total nonagricultural jobs last month than a year prior, and a 4.1% unemployment rate.
The fresh jobs data comes after years of explosive economic growth in Texas and especially in D-FW, a region that’s fast emerging as a new national financial hub and continues to attract various high-profile corporate relocations.
That corporate growth has also created a considerable inertia effect: Earlier this week, one report from the data firm Lightcast ranked D-FW first among the nation’s large metro areas in a talent attraction scorecard, largely because so many new workers have been flocking to the region.
“Dallas has been scoring quite well over the past decade,” said Cole Napper, a Lightcast researcher who worked on the report. “If I were to give my own hypothesis on why that’s the case, it’s because of a cumulative effect where growth begets more growth, attraction begets more attraction.”