Texas employers added 5,600 nonfarm jobs in August, but San Antonio-New Braunfels and Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos moved in opposite directions: San Antonio-New Braunfels lost 1,600 employed workers compared with a year earlier, while Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos gained 7,500. San Antonio’s unemployment rate was 4.3% a year earlier, while Austin’s rate ticked up slightly, to 3.9% from 3.8%.
A Tale of Two Metros
According to the San Antonio Express-News, San Antonio-New Braunfels counted 1.29 million employed workers in August, down from the prior year, while Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos reported 1.51 million employed workers, up 7,500 over the same period. Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands added 22,900 workers and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington added 14,600, according to the same report, underscoring that San Antonio was something of an outlier among the state’s largest metro areas.
San Antonio’s struggles were concentrated in specific sectors. Information services employment in the metro fell 7.7%, government employment dropped 3.1%, and federal government jobs specifically declined 6.7%, the Express-News reported. Not every sector in the city struggled, however: transportation, warehousing and utilities employment climbed 7.6%, and professional and business services rose 4.8% in San Antonio.
Austin’s Growth Engine Keeps Humming
Austin’s gains were broader. Mining, logging and construction employment in the Austin metro rose 4.2% and manufacturing jobs increased 2.9%, per the same report. Austin wasn’t immune to the information-sector slump troubling the rest of the state, though — the report shows information services employment there fell 5.5%, even as other categories more than offset the loss.
The pattern in Austin tracks with a longer trend. Austin added 27,200 jobs in 2025, or 2.0% growth, ranking as the best-performing large metro among the 50 biggest in the country for job growth that year, according to Opportunity Austin. San Antonio’s 2025 job growth, by contrast, was just 0.5%. Austin’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stood at 3.7% in January, lower than San Antonio’s 4.2% that same month, the group’s data show.
Statewide Numbers Tell a Mixed Story
Texas has added 159,400 jobs so far in 2026, putting annual job growth at roughly 1%, about half a percentage point above the national average, per the Express-News report. That’s a comedown from the state’s long-run average of about 2% annual job growth. Texas’s non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rate held at 4.6% in August, unchanged from a year earlier but improved from 4.8% in July, and still higher than the 4.4% national average that month…