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Updated 6 months ago on . Most recent reply

What is considered a bad unemployment rate for a city?
I was recently looking for deals on Zillow, and I stumbled upon something I liked upon doing some research to find out if thats a good area to invest in. I saw that the area has a 5.3% unemployment rate. So here's the question: is there a rule of thumb for unemployment rate? What's considered good and what's considered bad?
Most Popular Reply

Quote from @Andrew Syrios:
In some ways you can just point to a hard and fast number as being bad, like over 10% is a problem for sure. In others it's relative because, say after the Great Recession, everywhere had bad unemployment and you would have been looking for places with the least bad unemployment.
I think 5.3%, while not great, is fine. It's a bit higher than the national at 4.2%, but that's not an extreme difference. If it's a few points higher than the national, then the area is likely economically depressed. In this case, 6% would be concerning and 7% would be bad, more or less.
Thanks a lot for the insight! I appreciate it and will definitely keep that in mind next time