The jobless picture for Florida entering March saw an uptick in the number of weekly unemployment filings.
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) report on new claims saw an increase of 374 for the week ending March 7. The total figure settled at 5,458 filings, up from 5,084 for the previous week.
The weekly figure has held below 6,000 for most of this year in Florida. Also, for the second week in a row, Florida has bucked the national trend.
There were a total of 206,161 filings across the country for the first week in March. That’s a decrease of 8,108 from the last week in February, which amounts to a 3.8% drop, slightly more than what economists had expected. DOL analysts had projected a drop in claims and had originally estimated there would be 6,843 fewer filings, which would have amounted to a decline by 3.2%.
In the year-over-year comparison, there was a decline for the same comparable week. There were 214,006 filings in the initial week of March in 2025.
The broader general unemployment figure for Florida is 4.3%, just below the national rate of 4.4%. The state figure accounts for 486,000 Floridians who are out of work. That’s out of a labor force of 11.22 million in the state.
The Florida unemployment rate represents a notable increase from a year ago. The jobless rate had remained flat at 3.6% in the Sunshine State in March 2025. That figure ticked up to 3.7% for most of the summer and then increased past 4% in the fall while regular data had stalled due to the federal government shutdown between October heading into November.
