May is a second straight month of strong job growth in Wisconsin

The last three months of the US jobs market has shown a bounce upwards from the near-zero job growth we had for 2025 and the first two months of 2026. And for the last 2 months, Wisconsin has also been part of that positive trend, as this week's release of the state jobs report for May came in strong.

Employment – There were 3,024,100 people employed in Wisconsin, up 4,000 over the month and up 5,800 over the year.
• Labor Force – The state’s labor force participation rate remained unchanged at 64.4% which is 2.6 percentage points above the national rate of 61.8%.
• Nonfarm Jobs – The total nonfarm jobs in the state were 3,039,800, an increase of 8,700 over last month.
• Unemployment – The state's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate ticked down to 3.4%, which is 0.9 percentage points below the national unemployment rate of 4.3%.

All of these four measures are good, and comes on the heels of a big gain in April of 11,300.

Put it together, and that's a gain of 20,000 in the last two months. And it means that the sizable job losses between last July and March in Wisconsin have now been regained, and we also have the first year-over-year increase in private sector jobs in our state in these reports since July 2025.

A main driver of May’s strong job growth in Wisconsin was construction (+2,900) and manufacturing (+2,300). For construction, it gets hiring back into the growth mode that it has been in for the last few years in Wisconsin, while for manufacturing, the last few months has been a welcome turnaround after losses between 2023 and 2025.

Even more impressive is that this reflects higher-than-normal warmer-weather hiring, although I’ll check back with June’s jobs report to see if that’s merely typical Summer hiring pulled forward.

Likewise, arts, entertainment and recreation had 2,000 jobs added on a seasonally adjusted basis and 10,000 in non-seasonally adjusted jobs. Given the early Memorial Day weekend (which came the week after jobs were surveyed), is that going to be reflected in a negative number in June because fewer people get hired in that one-month period?

It feels like it's bit too much too soon, to be honest, and I am interested to see if we get some kind of seasonal snapback in June. Still, the recent trend of job growth is good for Wisconsin, and unemployment also seems to have crested at a mid-3% level for our state for 2026. Overall, it's not a bad situation to be in.