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Overview of South Dakota labor market

December 2014 labor force and nonfarm industry employment data is now available online. See an overview of the new data.

Snapshot of South Dakota's economy

Get a quick synopsis, or snapshot, of the most current data available for numerous closely watched economic indicators.

Labor market information barometer

A real time labor market Information line graph, "LMI Barometer," graphically monitors fluctuations in the state's labor market, comparing the number of South Dakota residents seeking employment with the number of available jobs and the number of New Hires reported, using the most current data possible. See the LMI Barometer.

Seasonally adjusted November labor force data for metro areas available

Seasonally adjusted labor force data for South Dakota's Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) of Rapid City and Sioux Falls for November 2014 was released Dec. 30 from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). See the BLS news release or download the data from the BLS website. Historical data back to 2000 is available upon request to the BLS. December 2014 data will be available from BLS Feb. 4. See our release dates for other future releases. For more information about seasonally adjusted labor force data for metropolitan areas, please see the Question and Answer document prepared by BLS.

Rapid City metro area designation changing

The Rapid City Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) has changed to include Custer County as well as the previously-included counties of Pennington and Meade. MSAs, designated by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), must have at least one urbanized area of 50,000 or more population, plus adjacent territory that has a high degree of social and economic integration with the core as measured by commuting ties.

The various data sets available from LMIC will be phasing this new three-county Rapid City MSA designation into the data over the next several months. For example, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wage data set has incorporated Custer County data into data for the Rapid City MSA beginning with data for first quarter 2014 (January, February and March 2014), available now on this website. The labor force data set will begin using the new MSA designation with January 2015 data. Footnotes will be used to identify when Custer County data has been added to the Rapid City MSA data for each respective data set, until the change has been implemented across all data sets.

Release dates

Click here to find out when the next data release from LMIC will be.