WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — For an economy that has struggled to find enough jobs for everyone who wants one, it was a very good year.

Not the best year ever, but good enough.

For the third year in a row, the number of jobs created was greater than increase in the population. In 2015, nonfarm payrolls rose by 2.65 million, while the population of the United States increased by 2.47 million, according to the Census Bureau.

This is a rare occurrence; it happens only during periods of exceptional job growth, such as the late 1960s, mid-1970s and mid-1980s, when the ranks of the employed were swelled by the baby-boom generation and by the entry of millions of women into the workforce. It’s happened only five times since 1990.

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More annual highlights from the employment report:

• The number of unemployed people declined by 800,000 during the year to 7.9 million. It was the sixth year in a row that unemployment fell.

• The number of people who had been unemployed for six months or longer fell by 687,000 to 2.1 million. But they didn’t just drop out of the labor force in discouragement: The number of people who aren’t counted as officially unemployed but who say they want a job nevertheless declined by 521,000 to 5.9 million.

• The most straight-forward measure of slack in the economy — the number of unemployed people plus the number who say they want a job — fell by 1.3 million to 13.8 million.

• The number of people who say they were forced by economic circumstances to accept a part-time job rather than the full-time job they wanted declined by 764,000 to 6 million. It was the sixth year in a row that involuntary part-time employment fell.

• The total number of people working part-time hours (less than 35 per week) declined by 86,000 to 27.4 million during 2015, despite wide-spread concerns that the Affordable Care Act would turn us into a nation of part-timers. Full-time employment rose by 2.6 million to 122.6 million.

• As a result of all this job growth, the official U-3 unemployment rate dropped from 5.6% to 5%, the lowest since 2007. The broader U-6 underemployment rate fell twice as much, from 11.2% to 9.9%. The U-6 rate is still two percentage points higher than it was in 2006, however.

Now for the bad news.

• The labor-force participation rate declined for the ninth year in a row, from 62.7% to 62.6%, and the decline wasn’t all due to the aging of the population. For those in their prime working years (25 to 54), the labor-force participation rate fell by a tenth of a percentage to 80.8%. The participation rate for young people (16 to 24) did improve over the year, rising to 55.6% from 54.9%.

The labor market still has plenty of slack, and wages are still too low. But we made a lot of progress in 2015 toward full employment.