Restaurant and hotel jobs, September 2026
Phoenix-metro restaurants, bars, hotels and venues employed 255,900 people in September 2026, down 1.8% from a year earlier — 10.3% of all payroll jobs in the metro.
No other series on this site records 2020 as plainly. Employment in this sector fell from 242,300 in February 2020 to 140,600 in April 2020 — a drop of 42%, inside two months, in an industry that cannot be done from home — and its share of the region’s jobs fell to 7.1%. Everything to the right of that notch is the recovery.
The share chart is the longer story: from 10.4% when the series opens in January 1990 to a peak of 11.3% in April 2017.
Not seasonally adjusted, and summer is genuinely the busy season here, so compare with the same month a year earlier. The share is computed at read time from the same BLS release as the count.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State & Area Employment, leisure and hospitality and total nonfarm payrolls, Phoenix–Mesa–Chandler MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.