MSA unemployment rate
4.2%
Civilian labor force 522.0k; employed 500.2k; unemployed 21.8k (thousands, NSA, preliminary).
Economy
Rochester economy
Retrieved September 25, 2026. Each figure keeps its own geography.
Key figures
MSA employment (household survey)
500,200
MSA total nonfarm jobs
508,300
12-month change −1.3% (preliminary). July 2026 level was 516.1k before the August preliminary print.
Education and health services jobs
127,700
Largest major industry group in the MSA CES table; the sector that frames workday Rochester for most readers.
Manufacturing jobs
48,700
Still a real payroll block; 12-month change −1.8% (preliminary). Context for the Kodak / optics legacy frame — not the dominant employer story.
Monroe County population
750,506
Rochester city population
206,108
Monroe County median household income
$76,382
Rochester city median household income on the same table: $47,213 (2020–2024, 2024 dollars). City and county are different economies for income and poverty.
How to read
Rochester, NY MSA (CBSA 40380). MSA labor figures are metro-wide. Monroe County and Rochester city figures are nested geographies — do not treat them as the same place. Counties in that metro: Monroe, Ontario, Wayne, Livingston, Orleans.
Rochester’s everyday economy is health care, higher education, and the grocery-and-errand corridor — University of Rochester / UR Medicine and Rochester Regional Health on the payroll side, Wegmans and the south retail strip on the commercial side — layered over a manufacturing legacy that still shows up in the numbers but no longer sets the weeknight map. Suburbs (Pittsford, Brighton, Fairport, Henrietta) sit in the same labor market as downtown and the neighborhood streets; people commute across that whole MSA for work and shop close to home.
Read the MSA labor lines as the weekly job market people actually work in (Monroe plus Ontario, Wayne, Livingston, and Orleans). Read Monroe and city population/income as place scale — the city is about one-quarter of the county by population and has a much lower median household income on the same Census table. BLS August 2026 CES and July 2026 LAUS prints marked preliminary can revise. Employer headcounts come from Greater Rochester Enterprise’s November 2025 compilation (multi-source), not from BLS CES industry totals; use them to name anchors, not to add up to metro payroll.
No invented inflation or MSA CPI — BLS does not publish a Rochester CPI series comparable to the national index on this page.
Do not present MSA unemployment and Monroe County population as interchangeable geographies.
CES jobs ≠ LAUS employment; both appear because readers meet both in headlines.
GRE employer counts are local-employee estimates as of November 2025; verify before claiming a newer rank order.
NY Fed regional chart cites MSA population ~1.06M (2024) and GDP ~$77B (2023); not duplicated in keyFigures until we pin a primary Census/BEA URL in-product.
Named anchors
Not a BLS series
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University of Rochester (incl. UR Medicine)
38,565
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Rochester Regional Health
19,815
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Wegmans Food Markets Inc.
12,768
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Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT)
4,321
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Paychex
4,321
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Eastman Kodak Company
1,300