As the unemployment rate ticks up both nationally and locally, some industry experts expressed concern while another noted it represents more of a return to “normal.”

Nationally, the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in November, the highest level since September 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Data was unavailable for October due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metro area jumped to 4.8% in September — up two-tenths of a percentage point from August and five-tenths of a percentage point from September 2024, according to the state Department of Labor and Industry.

Specifically, the number of unemployed increased by 1,300 from September 2024 to September 2025 and 300 over the month, the number of employed decreased by 2,400 over the year and 400 over the month, and the labor force dropped by 1,000 over the year but remained flat over the month, state data shows.

Local unemployment data will not be released for October, state officials said.

Teri Ooms, executive director of the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Development, a regional data analysis, research and consulting organization, noted the overall economic landscape isn’t very favorable.

“It’s not a good look,” Ooms said. “We’re hearing all sorts of stories about companies not just doing a hiring freeze, but doing layoffs. And when you think about the composition of our regional economy, we have a strong export market, which means we’re likely to import products. We also have a very strong manufacturing sector, and that makes us part of the global economy. As policy shifts with regard to tariffs and fear of what can happen next, companies pull back, and I think this is what we’re seeing. We probably will continue to see some of these shifts into 2026 until there’s some stabilization of what the economic policy is and what tariffs will be going forward. It is a little concerning.”

Ooms added that seeing the unemployment rate rising locally isn’t a good sign, but she isn’t ready to start panicking.

“It is a little disconcerting to see it going up, but I think it’s more of the external issues that are affecting it rather than indicating that our current business sectors are weak and crumbling,” she said. “We’re at a bit of a crossroads, but it’s not just us. It’s another situation where we’re not the outlier as we have been in the past. We’re right along with every other community, region and state in the country.”

Ooms added there are more jobs available than people to fill them.

“It’s not just locally, it’s a national phenomenon,” she said. “It goes back to the shifts in demographics where people started having less children, and families became smaller, and we’ve had significant growth in the economy so job growth outpaced population growth.

“I think probably one of the scariest things is we know this is a national issue. We can’t grow from within, just like that, and have a labor force, and one of the the biggest areas is health care. We’re in a period of uncertainty and I think we’re going to remain here a little bit into the early part of 2026. Then, as that uncertainly clears up,  there becomes a path forward. I don’t see us on a continually downward spiral. I think we will level off and stay level through most of 2026 and maybe see some market improvement in 2027.”

Lauren Riegel, a state industry and business analyst, feels the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metro area remains in a good spot, economically, at least for now.

“I don’t know that I would call it concern so much as it would be good to keep an eye on things, but a rate of 4.8% is still very, very healthy,” she said. “Years ago, we used to consider 5% full employment, so anything below 5% is really unusual. We’ve been in kind of an unusual phase in the last few years where we’ve seen such low unemployment rates. If we start showing more significant increases, then I would start to be a little bit more concerned about how the economy is doing, but I think we’re still in a very comfortable position.”

However, like Ooms, Satyajit Ghosh, Ph.D., a University of Scranton economist, raised some alarms about the state of the local economy.

“You can always argue that we should not jump to conclusions just by looking at one particular month’s change, but it you look at July, August, September, you would see there is a trend that you can’t really escape,” he said. “The rate of job creation has slowed down and the unemployment rate is rising. The days of the booming labor market that we saw in 2023 and 2024 are gone. It’s already showing all the signs of weakness.”

Riegel stressed it was almost inevitable for an increase in the local unemployment rate after several years where it remained much lower than usual — including reaching an all-time low of 4.2% for a few months in 2024.

“Historically, 4.8% is still a very, very low rate,” she said. “Prior to 2022, the historic low unemployment rate had been 4.9%, which was set in 2000. Unemployment increased in each of the last seven months with the increase of 300 (in September) being the largest of them. But, prior to that, we had been seeing drops for such a long time and then things were kind of almost stagnant for a few years. We were showing very little movement in the unemployment rate or unemployment itself. We were eventually going to see things move in one direction or the other, and it would have been very hard to go down.”