Douglas County Economic Indicators - November 2025

tcarpenter03
3 days ago
2 min read

The November 2025 edition of the Douglas County Economic Indicators is also available at this QualityInfo.org link.

After being delayed by the federal shutdown, Oregon’s local monthly employment reports for September will be released on Tuesday, December 16th. In the meantime, I’ll be highlighting other recent data releases from our programs. We will return to the regular schedule of monthly local data releases in 2026.

There are two special topics to highlight this month.

Job Vacancies: The number of private job vacancies declined in Oregon over the year to the summer of 2025, with a smaller decline taking place in Southwestern Oregon. In Oregon, there were around 2 unemployed people per vacancy, higher than in 2022, but much lower than in 2020. It’s a looser labor market than in the recent past, but we’re not currently seeing a dramatic increase in unemployment like we did in 2020 or for several years after 2008.

Wage Change by Industry: we regularly use wage record data to see what how median wages are changing over time in each industry in our “Oregonians @ Work” publication, available on Quality Info. From the first quarter of 2024 to 2025 the median wage adjusted for inflation in Oregon grew by 0.6%.

This can look a lot different in each industry, and interpretation isn’t always straightforward. Wage growth was much higher in government and information, and lower in transportation, leisure and hospitality, and health care, but those industries’ employment grew (or declined) at very different rates over the year. Median real wages could increase because of higher compensation for incumbent workers, as an after-effect of lower levels of inflation in the past several years, or due to layoffs for lower wage workers, or many other reasons besides.

This month’s articles included: