Long Island Added 7,100 Jobs. Health Care Added 13,900.
The state labor briefing shows two sectors adding 16,900 jobs while the rest of the private economy shed 9,400. What that does to your hiring.
By Melville Chamber of Commerce ·
The New York State Department of Labor put out its Long Island briefing for July 2026 this month, and the headline number is unremarkable. The region held 1,405,300 nonfarm jobs, up 7,100 over the year, a gain of half a percent. Private employment reached 1,206,100, up 7,500. Government payrolls fell by 400.
Half a percent reads like a slow but healthy year. The sector table underneath the headline says something very different, and it is the table a member should be planning against.
Two sectors, and then everything else
Private education and health services added 13,900 jobs over the twelve months. Professional and business services added 3,000. Between them, those two sectors put on 16,900 positions.
The region gained 7,100. So every other part of the Long Island economy, taken together, shed roughly 9,800 jobs during the same year that the top line looked fine.
The declines, in order of size: leisure and hospitality down 4,500, financial activities down 1,600, trade, transportation and utilities down 1,200, natural resources, mining and construction down 900, manufacturing down 900, information down 500, government down 400. Only other services managed a gain outside the top two, and it was 200 jobs.
Leisure and hospitality is 10.5 percent of all jobs here, roughly 147,000 positions. Losing 4,500 of them is a three percent contraction in a single year, in the sector that tracks consumer discretionary spending more closely than any other.
What the growth sector is actually measuring
Private education and health services is now 23 percent of every job on Long Island, at 322,900 positions. It is hospitals, physician practices, home health agencies, nursing facilities, private schools and private universities. It is the largest sector in the region by a wide margin and it is the only one adding at scale.
That matters for how the number should be read. The money paying those 322,900 salaries comes from Medicare, Medicaid and commercial insurance. It does not come from whether households on Long Island feel like spending this quarter. So health care hiring tells a member almost nothing about whether their own customers are buying.
Leisure and hospitality is the mirror image. Restaurants, bars, hotels and caterers run on discretionary spending and close to nothing else. When that sector sheds 4,500 jobs across a year, it is not a story about people refusing to work. It is a story about demand.
Put the two together and the picture is a regional economy where one insurance-funded sector is masking contraction nearly everywhere consumers actually spend.
Unemployment rose, and the corridor is still tight
The region's unemployment rate was 3.8 percent in July, up over the year, and still 0.4 points below the state's 4.2 percent. Every one of Long Island's largest labor force areas came in under the state rate except the town of Brookhaven, at 4.3 percent.
By town: North Hempstead 3.3 percent, Huntington 3.4, Smithtown 3.4, Oyster Bay 3.5, Hempstead 3.9, Islip 4.1, Babylon 4.2, Brookhaven 4.3. Southampton, at 3.0 percent, was the lowest on the list.
Huntington Town at 3.4 percent is the number that governs hiring in the Melville and Route 110 corridor, and it has not loosened the way the regional sector losses might suggest. The people leaving hospitality jobs are not evenly distributed across the map.
What it means for members
If you are hiring hourly staff this fall, stop pricing off the market you remember from two years ago. The candidates exist, they are coming out of restaurants, bars and retail rather than out of health care, and the wage pressure on front-line roles should be materially easier this cycle. Post the opening before the fourth quarter retail hiring wave rather than after it.
If you sell to consumers, build your 2027 revenue plan against the leisure and hospitality line rather than the headline gain. That line has been contracting for a full year while the overall number stayed positive, and it is the closest public measure of what your customer base is willing to spend.
And if you are competing for clinical, technical or professional staff, understand that you are bidding directly against the only two sectors on Long Island that are growing, in a corridor where unemployment is 3.4 percent. Budget for that in the compensation conversation you are about to have, not in the one after it.
