Las Vegas Trendlines

Tuesday, October 27, 2026·Charts every weekday

Restaurant and hotel jobs, September 2026

economy
employment
Published

October 22, 2026

Leisure and hospitality payroll employment in the Las Vegas metro, thousands of jobs, NSA, 1990 to September 2026: from 122k to a peak of 306k in May 2024, a low of 122k in January 1990, now 303k.

Leisure and hospitality as a percent of all Las Vegas-metro payroll jobs, NSA, 1990 to September 2026: from 34.0% to 25.4%, with a high of 35.5% in August 1994.

Las Vegas-metro restaurants, bars, hotels and venues employed 302,800 people in September 2026, up 0.2% from a year earlier — 25.4% of all payroll jobs in the metro.

No other series on this site records 2020 as plainly. Employment in this sector fell from 292,300 in February 2020 to 125,200 in May 2020 — a drop of 57%, inside three months, in an industry that cannot be done from home — and its share of the region’s jobs fell to 16.2%. Everything to the right of that notch is the recovery.

The share chart is the longer story: from 34.0% when the series opens in January 1990 to a peak of 35.5% in August 1994.

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, Las Vegas–Henderson–North Las Vegas MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.