Want a Job? Try Madison

Madison, Wisconsin, has enjoyed the nation's best job market for the past 11 years.

Image: The Business Journals

It’s good to be a cheesehead, at least if you want to work, a new study by The Business Journals shows.

While the rest of the nation is mired in an unemployment rate hovering at 9.1 percent, Madison, Wisconsin, has averaged a much more worker-friendly rate of 3.5 percent through the first 11 years of the century. Its current rate is 5.3 percent.

That’s 3.8 percentage points less than the nation as a whole—at least as it stands today. The national unemployment rate may change one way or another with the release of the latest statistics from the Labor Department Friday, but it won't fall as low as Madison’s rate without a hiring miracle.

If you don’t like the snow so much, the second-best job market in the country is Honolulu’s, according to The Business Journals, Portfolio.com's parent company. There, the current unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, and the rate throughout the 2000s has been 3.7 percent. Washington, D.C., tied Honolulu with a 3.7 percent rate for the past 11 years and currently has a 5.7 percent unemployment rate.

On the other end of the spectrum is Fresno, California, which has had an unemployment rate of 10.7 percent for the years 2000 through 2011.

For a look at the unemployment picture in the biggest 100 metropolitan areas, click here.

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