North Dakota's unemployment rate for October is the lowest it's been in a decade.
Michael Zeisch is a spokesman for Job Service North Dakota and says the not seasonally adjusted unemployment rate last month was 1.9 percent, which is down from last October's 2.5 percent.
"You'd have to go back over ten years to find a rate below 2 percent. The historic low would have been 1.7 percent in 1997. So we're very close to our all time historic low."
Zeisch says September and October are typically the lowest for unemployment numbers, but says this year lots of factors have combined for added success.
"It's driven by strengths across most or all sectors of the economy. If you look at the jobs data, we're still posting very strong employment gains - over 15,000 employment gains year over year, led by mining but also construction has a lot of strength. And when you have strength in mining, extraction, and construction - those are the goods producing industries so they tend to have a lot of spin or multiplying effect."
Zeisch says the latest jobs report also included results for the month of September, which were not released because of the federal government shutdown. The not seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for September was 2 percent. Zeisch also says as the winter months begin the unemployment rates are expected to come up slightly, though remain low overall.