North Carolina’s jobless rate inched lower for a seventh month to 3.6 percent for October.

The North Carolina Department of Commerce announced Friday that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 0.2 percentage points lower than September’s. It’s also just shy of a 1 percentage point drop from the same month a year ago.

The October rate was also slightly lower than the national rate.

The number of people working in North Carolina rose slightly from the previous month to over 4.8 million, which includes an increase of nearly 64,000 over the year.

The industries with the biggest increases from the previous month were leisure and hospitality services, which added 11,500 employees; and professional and business services, with 7,000.