Federal Reserve Economic Data

On January 7, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the third quarter data for total nonfarm employees at the state and metro levels in 2025. These numbers are being released a little later than usual due to the government shutdown last fall. At the state level, New York led all states, adding 39,667 jobs in the third quarter. Florida had the largest decline, losing 22,300 jobs. Missouri led the 8th District states with 25,000 jobs added while Illinois was last, losing 2,233 jobs.

The FRED map above shows the change in employment in each state during the third quarter. If you sum up the individual states, you’ll see a net gain of 129,800 jobs. This is different from the reported number for the nation, which was 88,000 at the end of the third quarter. This difference occurs because the state level has different sampling and tends to have a larger margin of error than the national number.

At the metro level, the New York-Newark-Jersey City MSA led the nation with 38,300 jobs added in the third quarter. The Washington-Arlington-Alexandria MSA had the largest decline, losing 12,867 jobs in the third quarter. The St. Louis MSA lost 6,000 jobs. These numbers tend to vary greatly from quarter to quarter, with even greater sampling errors than the errors at the state and national levels. So, be careful not to read too much into these data.

NOTE: These data are subject to future revision by the source, with an annual revision the following March. Our ALFRED database records vintages of the data, so users can view the data as they appeared at various points in history: These links provide employment data for Missouri and St. Louis as of January 7, 2026.

How these maps were created: Search FRED for “total nonfarm employees in Missouri” (or any other state). Click “View Map” and then “Edit Map.” Change the units to “Change, Thousands of Persons” and the frequency to quarterly with aggregation method “End of Period.” Under “Format,” select “User Defined Method” for how to group the data: Switch the number of color groups to 3 and change the colors to red for states that shed jobs (or a value less than or equal to 0), light green for states with modest job growth (or less than 10), and dark green for states with strong growth (or a value large enough to incorporate the rest of the states). For the second map, repeat the process with an MSA—St. Louis, for example.

Suggested by John Fuller and Charles Gascon.

The scale of US international trade as a share of the entire US economy peaked around 2011. Since then, US international trade has moderated.

In this post, we look at how this moderation affected international goods exports from the top goods exporting US states.

We rank US states by their cumulative exports since 1997, the first year of availability of state GDP data in FRED, where state GDP is necessary to compute a state’s exports to GDP ratio. The largest exporting states over the past three decades are

• Texas
• California
• New York
• Washington*
• Illinois

To see how important exports have been for these states, relative to the size of the state’s economy, we create ratios of state exports to state GDP. And that is what our FRED graph above shows. We also do the same for the national export-to-GDP ratio.

California, New York, and Illinois largely follow the national pattern, although California exhibits a somewhat more significant drop in recent years compared with the years immediately after the Great Recession.

Washington, however, experienced a much sharper drop in its exports-to-GDP ratio in recent years: It was just under 7% in 2024 compared with a peak of almost 21% in 2014. The trade dispute with China between 2017 and 2019 and loss of market share in top export categories, such as transportation equipment and agricultural products, contributed to this decline.

Texas is at the other end of the spectrum: Its export-to-GDP ratio peaked at about 20% in 2022, defying the national trend. The last decade’s strong oil and gas exports performance for Texas was a major factor driving this peak.

Although the national picture shows a gradual moderation in the export-to-GDP ratio since 2011-12, the picture for some individual states is considerably different.

*If you don’t measure cumulative exports since 1997, and look only at recent exports, then Washington is replaced by Louisiana.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for and select the annual series of “Exports of Goods for Texas.” From the “Edit Graph” panel, take the annual frequency aggregated as a sum, add “Gross Domestic Product: All Industry Total in Texas,” and apply the formula (a*100)/(b) to get percentages. Repeat these steps for other states. For the United States, use the same method and apply the formula (a*100)/(b*1000).

Suggested by Subhayu Bandyopadhyay and Hoang Le.

Mortgage loans allow households to buy a home or to borrow money against the value of a home they already own. With mortgage loans, the real estate is offered as collateral, a payback guarantee for the lender.

Our FRED graph above shows the billions of dollars lent by large US banks to consumers in newly issued mortgage loans. Data are available between the third quarter of 2013 and the second quarter of 2025. Each of the three lines represents a separate purpose for borrowing these funds:

• Purchasing a home (solid blue line)
• Refinancing the mortgage to secure more affordable repayment terms, including the interest rate on the loan (dashed green line)
• Refinancing the mortgage to receive a cashout for the difference between the new mortgage loan and the original loan (dashed orange line)

The relative importance of each purpose has changed over time.

Between 2013 and 2016, for every new dollar borrowed to purchase a home, another dollar was borrowed to refinance a mortgage loan. Between mid-2017 and mid-2019, new borrowing for home purchases outpaced refinancing. Between 2019 and  2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, refinancings rose above new mortgages as homeowners took advantage of lower interest rates, despite many homeowners changing locations and moving into new homes.

Starting in 2022, when interest rates began to rise, mortgage refinancing quickly declined. Soon after, borrowing to purchase a home also declined, but not as much. As of mid-2025, the latest data available at the time of this writing, new borrowing to purchase a home was 2.7 times larger than borrowing to refinance a mortgage loan.

How this graph was created: Search FRED for and select “Large Bank Consumer Mortgage Originations: Purpose Type: Purchase.” Click on the “Edit Graph” button and select the “Add Line” tab to search for and select “Large Bank Consumer Mortgage Originations: Purpose Type: Refinance – Rate / Term & Other Refinance.” Don’t forget to click on “Add data series.” Repeat the last two steps to search for and add the third series: “Large Bank Consumer Mortgage Originations: Purpose Type: Refinance – Cashout.”

Suggested by Diego Mendez-Carbajo.