Restaurant and hotel jobs, September 2026
Los Angeles-metro restaurants, bars, hotels and venues employed 782,000 people in September 2026, up 1.5% from a year earlier — 12.4% of all payroll jobs in the metro.
No other series on this site records 2020 as plainly. Employment in this sector fell from 773,300 in February 2020 to 423,000 in May 2020 — a drop of 45%, inside three months, in an industry that cannot be done from home — and its share of the region’s jobs fell to 8.0%. Everything to the right of that notch is the recovery.
The share chart is the longer story: from 7.9% when the series opens in January 1990 to a peak of 12.7% in July 2019.
Not seasonally adjusted, and summer is genuinely the busy season here, so compare with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from the same BLS release as the count.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, leisure and hospitality and total nonfarm payrolls, Los Angeles–Long Beach–Anaheim MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.
Corrected 2026-10-24: this post first said employment fell to 408,100 in January 1993 — the lowest month in the whole series, not the 2020 low. The figures above are now the 2020 low.