Maui County’s labor force gaining somewhat, first time 19 months after wildfire disaster

Maui County’s labor market conditions have improved, as of March, with the number of employed people at 79,500 being the highest since the August 2023 wildfire disaster, said Chief State Economist Eugene Tian.

Maui County’s labor force increased (0.3%) in March 2025 after declining 19 months after the wildfires, said Tian, who heads the Research and Economic Analysis Division of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism.

Tian also noted that:

• The non-agriculture payroll job recovery rate from the same month in 2019 was the highest in March 2025 at 92.2% (March 2025 data divided by March 2019 data).
• Unemployment rate at 3% in March 2025 was the lowest since the wildfires (August 2023).
• Average weekly initial unemployment claims of 153 in March 2025 was the second lowest since the wildfires, the lowest was December 2024 at 151. As a comparison, the average weekly initial unemployment claims in 2019 was 144 (full year average).

“We did notice that Maui County’s labor force shrank by 0.3% during the first quarter of 2025 while all the other counties experienced increases in labor force (Honolulu County at +2%; Hawaiʻi County at +1.3%; Kauaʻi County at +3.1%, and statewide at +1.7%),” Tian said in an email. “The decrease in labor force mainly happened in January and February 2025. This is an indication that Maui residents were either moving out of island or they withdrew from the labor force during the first two months of 2025, but some of the people came back to the labor force in March.”

University of Hawaiʻi economist JoonYup Park analyzed US Census Bureau data. He explored Hawaiʻi’s migration patterns by age, race and place of birth. He found that, although Hawaiʻi continues to have a net domestic out-migration (meaning more people leaving than coming to the islands to live), international in-migration has helped balance the total net-migration rate.

Overall, Maui County’s not seasonally adjusted unemployment rate has fallen 1.7 percentage points from 4.7% in March 2024 to 3% the same month this year, according to a DBEDT’s monthly report released Thursday.

The March figure is also lower than February 2025’s 3.4% Maui County unemployment rate.

For Maui island, the drop was a little greater to the same point — from 4.8% in March 2024 to 3% in March 2025. Lānaʻi’s unemployment rose from 1.6% to 3.5%, the highest in the county, over the same year-over-year period.

Molokaʻi, which had the highest unemployment figures for many years, dropped from 3.3% to 2.1%, the lowest jobless rate in the county in the same period.

Statewide, unemployment decreased from 2.7% to 2.4% this past March. In February of this year, the state’s jobless rate was 2.8%.

The state of Hawaiʻi’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 2.9% in March 2025 is lower than the national rate of 4.2%. Hawaiʻi’s rate is unchanged from a year earlier. The national rate is up from 3.9%.