Los Angeles-metro unemployment, August 2026
Los Angeles-metro unemployment was 4.8% in August 2026, the newest month in the series and the monthly update to the unemployment post. That is down 1.0 point from 5.8% in the same month a year earlier, and down from 5.0% the month before. The chart carries the full history back to 1990; the older post’s version of it stops at the month it was published with, so the two lines end in different places on purpose.
The year-ago comparison is the one to trust here. These numbers are not seasonally adjusted, so part of every month-to-month move is just the calendar — hiring for the holidays, students leaving and re-entering the labor force — and only the same month a year earlier strips that out. Keep the scale in mind too: this series ran from 3.7% in April 2019 to 17.9% in May 2020, so a few tenths of a point is a wobble, not a turn. And because the rate is a ratio, it can fall for the wrong reason — people who stop looking for work leave the denominator, and the rate improves with nobody hired.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Local Area Unemployment Statistics, Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim MSA unemployment rate, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED LOSA106URN. Auto-generated each build.