MCLEAN, Va. (DC News Now) — For the first time in years, unemployment is rising faster in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., than in the city itself, a recent report shows.
New data analysisfrom the Brookings Institution shows a dramatic shift in the region’s labor market. Between June 2024 and June 2025, the D.C. metro area added more than 20,000 newly unemployed workers, while another 20,000 dropped out of the labor force altogether. That’s a loss of more than 46,000 people from the workforce in a single year, not including Q3 employment reports.
This marks a historic reversal in a region where economic hardship has traditionally hit hardest in the District and lower-income suburbs. The DMV region includes three of the five wealthiest counties in the country, areas that are now seeing some of the steepest job losses…