Downtown Baltimore and the Inner Harbor, seen from Federal Hill Park. Photo: Baron Maddock, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Maryland’s unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent in September, the Maryland Department of Labor said on Oct. 20, citing new estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In an official release datelined Baltimore, the department said the September rate was 0.2 percentage points lower than the month before and below the national average of 4.2 percent, the lowest state rate since April 2025. The labor force participation rate remained 63.7 percent, compared with 61.8 percent nationally, the department said.
The same release said BLS also estimated that Maryland employment fell by 8,800 total nonfarm jobs in September. The department noted that the unemployment rate and the job count come from two different surveys, and it warned that recent employer-based state job estimates have been volatile and may reflect problems in data collection rather than sharp swings in employment. It pointed to other measures, including fewer unemployment claims in September 2026 than in August 2026, and fewer claims than in September 2024 or September 2025.
The official release listed estimated September job gains in transportation, warehousing and utilities (700), manufacturing (600), professional, scientific and technical services (200), and government (200). The largest estimated losses were in health care and social assistance (2,400), accommodation and food services (2,000), arts, entertainment and recreation (1,700), administrative and support and waste management (1,500), and private educational services (900). The department said it will keep watching multiple measures during this period of data volatility.
