More than half of US states could take over a year for their job markets to fully recover

• Some states may see a faster recovery than others if they add jobs each month at their current pace.
• We used employment data to estimate how long it would take each state to reach pre-pandemic levels.
• Utah could recover in just a month, based on the state's six-month average of employment growth.

The US labor market is still slowly recovering from the massive job loss last year, with around 9.5 million fewer jobs in February 2021 than there were a year ago. States across the US are also seeing job gains at different rates, but almost every state was still below pre-pandemic employment in January.

At the recent pace of employment growth, it could take more than half the states and Washington, DC over a year to recover to February 2020 employment levels. Some of these states, like California and Florida, may even take several years to get back to their earlier employment levels if monthly employment gains don't speed up.

As the job market continues to recover, Insider decided to look at how long it may take states to reach their employment levels seen in February 2020, the month before the coronavirus outbreak was officially declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

To do this, we calculated the six-month averages of employment growth for each state between July 2020 and January 2021 from the latest release of state employment data. Assuming the same pace of growth in future months using these averages, we estimated how many months or years it could take states to reach pre-pandemic employment.

The following map highlights how long it could take each state to get back to nonfarm employment from before the pandemic. Idaho has already reached its pre-pandemic employment level. Because the six-month average for New Mexico was a negative value, an estimated recovery could not be calculated.

Based on Utah's six-month average, it could take the state around a month to get back to pre-pandemic employment at this pace; the state was only 0.2% below February 2020 employment. The next shortest length of recovery based on these averages was five months, seen in both Montana and South Dakota.

On the other hand, it could take several states a year or two to see a full job recovery. Using the six-month averages, it could take Iowa, Wisconsin, and Colorado a year and three months to get back to their employment levels before the pandemic at this pace.

Some states may take several years at the current job growth pace. Oregon had a relatively small six-month average of employment growth at 1,900. The state was also 8.4% below February 2020 employment in January 2021. At this pace, it could take the state over seven years to see a full recovery. However, larger monthly gains could mean a shorter recovery.

Getting back to pre-pandemic employment in Hawaii and California, the states that had the highest unemployment rates in January, could take a while if there aren't larger monthly gains. Hawaii is 18.4% below its February 2020 employment level of 662,300 and could take almost six years at this pace. California is 10.2% below pre-pandemic employment and could take almost four and a half years if monthly gains continue to be the same as its six-month average.

It is important to note that these are just estimates and could differ from what actually happens, depending on what monthly growth looks like as states continue to recover from last spring's job losses. But as Indeed economist Nick Bunker previously told Insider, the US needs to see larger monthly gains to get back to pre-pandemic employment.

"Not only is the pace of growth we're seeing insufficient to really make a dent in the jobs trend, but also we need many, many more months to really make any sort of clawback in the millions of jobs we've lost over the course of the pandemic," Bunker previously told Insider about the US monthly gains seen in 2021 so far.

Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a White House press briefing after the US employment situation released earlier this month that it would take "more than two years of job growth at February's pace just to get back to pre-pandemic levels."