COEUR d’ALENE — There may be signs of weakness in the national labor market, but according to Sam Wolkenhauer of the Idaho Department of Labor, Idaho’s numbers are telling a different story. 

“Locally, our labor market continues to perform really well,” Wolkenhauer said Tuesday during an economic forecast presentation for the Coeur d’Alene Regional Chamber.  

It’s performing so well, in fact, that IDL found Coeur d’Alene to be the top-performing metro area in the state.  

“We don’t need to go out of our way to find the positives and the good news,” he said to a few hundred people at The Coeur d'Alene Resort.

Wolkenhauer noted that North Idaho’s economy is now “significantly larger and more complex” than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, citing 20% population growth, a 24% increase in employment, and more than a 50% rise in total wages and the number of employers. 

Coeur d’Alene has seen an “exceptional” run of job creation over the last two years, he added, while the opposite is true of the national labor market. 

Concentrated job growth at the national level is in the healthcare industry, with 1.8 million jobs added since the beginning of 2024.  

“If you were to exclude these healthcare numbers, we would be talking about the labor market in a very different light,” Wolkenhauer said. “We are seeing an economy that’s not only weakening on the labor side, it’s also very imbalanced.” 

In Idaho, meanwhile, job creation has remained proportional to industry size. About a quarter of new jobs in the state are in healthcare.  

“This is a much (healthier) economic situation,” he said. 

Economist John Mitchell provided a similar assessment of the country’s labor and economic conditions.  

He said the national unemployment rate stands at 4.3%, a figure tempered by a slowdown in labor force growth. 

In 2025, the economy added an average of 15,000 jobs per month, a sharp drop from 2024’s monthly average of 122,000 new jobs. 

Mitchell cited immigration policy as one of the main drivers of the slowdown. 

“Immigration and deportation policies are impacting labor supply in agriculture, construction, leisure and hospitality,” he said. 

The U.S. also experienced a decline in in-migration over the past year, and overall population growth slowed to just 0.5%. 

Chief Economist Steve Scranton of Washington Trust Bank said that finding skilled labor remains a challenge at the regional level.

Among Idaho’s neighboring states, which include Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming, half saw their labor force decline even as overall population growth increased. 

“If you have an economy that’s growing and you want it to continue to grow, you have to continue to bring in people to fill those jobs that provide goods and services,” Scranton said.  

Housing affordability remains a significant hurdle for the region’s labor force, with homes in all six states unaffordable for a single-income household.   

The median price for a single-family home in Kootenai County hit $562,000 last month, the highest in more than three years.  

Scranton attributed the issue of affordability to “a fundamental supply and demand problem,” and said a significant drop in housing costs is unlikely.  

“Even if the economy starts to weaken, we won’t see the drop that we did in 2008 and 2009,” Scranton said. 

Some of Idaho’s neighbors did see modest relief over the past year, with housing prices falling 0.5% in Washington, 0.8% in Oregon and 1.5% in Nevada. 

“That’s encouraging, but not encouraging enough for the younger generations,” Scranton said.

    Mitchell
  

    Scranton