Unemployment data for 2015 was recently released and Lexington is continuing to thrive.

According to data from the Local Area Unemployment Statistics Program and the Kentucky Office of Employment and Training, Lexington’s 2015 annual unemployment rate was 3.8%. Although unemployment has been decreasing every year since 2009, this was this year was the lowest since 2001 when the annual unemployment rate was 3.7%.

Lexington’s unemployment rate was lowest in October at 3.5% and highest in January at 4.3%, but the unemployment rate has not reached 4% since July. In December, there were 165,358 people in Lexington’s labor force, of which 158,988 were employed and 6,370 were unemployed for an unemployment rate of 3.9%.

Lexington was consistently below the national unemployment rate by 1.5 percentage points on average every month. Kentucky’s unemployment rate closely followed the national average, usually within .3 percentage points.

Kentucky’s annual employment rate for 2015 was 5.2%, with the highest unemployment occurring in January at 6.1% and the lowest occurring in October at 4.3%.

Since 1990, Lexington’s unemployment rate generally decreased from 3.6% in 1990 to 2.0% in 1999, then incrementally rose to 4.8% in 2008 before jumping to 7.8% in 2009. Kentucky followed a similar pattern, with unemployment rates decreasing from 6.0% in 1990 to 4.2% in 2000, then gradually rising to 6.4% in 2008 before jumping to 10.3% in 2009. Kentucky’s unemployment rate continued to be over 10% in 2010, but that amount has been cut in half to 5.2% in 2015. In fact, the last time Kentucky’s annual unemployment rate was this low was in 2001 when it was also 5.2%.

Clearly, 2015 was a positive year for the economic growth and health of Lexington and Kentucky, and 2016 will surely continue this optimistic trend.