The state Employment Security Department issued its employment report for April this morning. The preliminary estimate is that seasonally adjusted employment in Washington grew by 7,700  from March to April. The estimate of February to March job growth was revised upward to 8,300, from the preliminary figure of 6,700 announced in last month’s report.  The preliminary estimate of April’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for the state is 6.1 percent, which represents a 0.2 point improvement from the revised 6.3 estimate for March.

As I have noted frequently on this blog (see for example), initial employment estimates are sometimes subject to considerable error. Eventually these estimates are revised based on job counts from unemployment insurance tax returns. The process of incorporating the UI records into the employment estimates is called “benchmarking.”

With this month’s employment report, job counts for October, November and December have now been benchmarked to UI records. This has added 12,700 to the December job count.

Job growth was much stronger in the last three months of 2013 than it initially appeared to be.

The monthly employment report is available here.