The Georgia Department of Labor (GDOL) announced this week an April preliminary unemployment rate of 13.3 percent.  April’s numbers represent the highest one-month recorded increase and also the highest total unemployment on record. Georgia’s April 2020 number of unemployed is more than 80,000 higher than the height of the Great Recession of 2009-2010.

“This is the highest unemployment rate on record, eclipsing the previous high of 10.6 percent that occurred in December 2010,” said Commissioner Mark Butler. “However, the cause of this high unemployment rate differs greatly from that of the previous record, and I have no doubt that we will recover just as quickly and get back to our record lows once again.”

The GDOL announced it has issued over $3.1 billion in combined state and federal unemployment benefits in the past nine weeks. Since the middle of March (week ending March 21, 2020), GDOL has processed 2,018,096 regular initial unemployment claims, more than the last five years combined (1.7 million).

In Northwest Georgia, Whitfield County has the highest unemployment in the state at 20.6% and Chattooga County came in with the fifth-highest in the state at 17.1% – up from 5.6% the previous month.

The good news is that unemployment in May seems to have trended downward as the state begins to recover from COVID-19 Pandemic shutdowns.