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1.43 million.
E M P LOY M E N T Business payrolls were decimated by COVID-19 lockdowns. Floridian total business payrolls have surpassed their pre-pandemic levels late in 2021. The pace of Florida’s labor market recovery has and will continue to exceed the recovery of the national job market. Our outlook for Florida’s job market is that this will continue to be the case through the end of 2025. Payroll job growth decelerated in 2017 to 2.2%, before it rose to 2.5% in 2018. Job growth eased to 2.1% in 2019 as Florida was closing in on full employment. Then came COVID-19 and the lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions which were followed by policies to try and counter the disastrous effects of shutting down the economy.
Job growth plummeted in March and April, contributing to an estimated 5.2% year-over-year contraction in 2020, but job growth rebounded to 2.6% in 2021 and will accelerate to 5.1% in 2022. Thereafter, job growth will decelerate to 2.3% in 2023, 1.5% in 2024 and 1.2% in 2025. Florida will continue to outpace national job growth over the forecast horizon (2022-2025) by an average of 0.8 percentage points.
Construction job growth turned negative in 2020 but has accelerated with housing starts continuing to grow amid depleted inventories and as largescale public works projects carried on uninterrupted by the pandemic. Despite the episodic plateauing in new home construction growth and the COVID-19 shakeup, growth rates in housing starts over the forecast horizon supported construction job growth of 4.2% in 2019, before falling to -0.6% in 2020 and then recovering to 2.0% in 2021. Job
growth should rise to 2.5% in 2022, to 0.1% in 2023 and contract 0.5% in 2024 before recovering to 0.8% in 2025. Average annual job growth during 2022-2025 will be 0.7%. Construction employment will average 589,769 in 2025—a level that is nearly 101,857 fewer jobs than the 2006 peak employment in the Construction sector. The Professional and Business Services sector will be the second fastest-growing sector in the state on average through 2025. Job growth in this sector is expected to be strong, averaging 3.8% during 2022-2025. Job growth in this sector eased in 2017 and 2018 to 3.0% and 2.8%. Growth in this sector decelerated further to 2.1% in 2019 and plunged to -2.9% in 2020 because of the pandemic and lockdowns. Growth accelerated to 3.9% in 2021, will rise to 5.1% in 2022, ease to 3.4% in 2023 and jump to 3.8% in 2024 before easing to 2.8% in 2025. The Professional and Business Services sector is comprised principally of whitecollar, service-providing businesses. The sector includes accounting firms, financial management companies, advertising agencies, computer systems design firms, law firms, architectural and engineering companies, and temporary employment agencies. Job losses during the COVID-19 recession were heavily concentrated in employment services and other business services as many businesses were forcibly closed. The Information sector is a mix of high-tech ventures, including computer programming and software development, but job growth in this sector has been weighed down by legacy media, which continues to wither from structural and technological changes in the gathering and disseminating of information, and most importantly, who pays (or doesn’t pay) for it. Sources of growth within this sector in Florida,
Institute for Economic Forecasting
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