CHARLESTON, W.Va – West Virginia’s workforce participation is dead last in the nation, according to the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce’s annual Campaign for Jobs Digest.
The publication reports a participation rate of 54.5%, down from 55.1% in 2024, which tied Mississippi for the lowest nationally.
“We are dead last in workforce participation—50th. The jobs numbers were just updated yesterday for the month of August, and we’ve lost nearly 10,000 people out of our civilian labor force from August 2025 to August 2026,” Brian Dayton, Vice President of Policy and Advocacy at the WV Chamber, said Thursday on MetroNews Talkline.
Workforce participation is one of the chamber’s chief concerns coming out of the digest, which assembles key statistics measuring the state’s economic health and competitiveness. West Virginia trails the national average of 62.5% by a significant margin.
“We need to be looking. How do we start closing that gap? It’s about an 8-point gap between the U.S. average and West Virginia. We can close a lot of that gap, and we need to be looking at how we close that,” Dayton said.
With those numbers in mind, Dayton said the WV Chamber is taking steps to work with unemployed West Virginians. Individuals within 26 weeks of employment are still considered part of the workforce, and he believes they need to communicate with them, as well as those who have been out of work for longer.
“What are we doing with those individuals while they are in there? What are we doing with those individuals once they drop out to continue to help them to say, ‘Hey, here are the jobs available? Here is your skillset. Let’s try to find a way to match you up and sync you up,” he said.
The digest also measures West Virginia’s business friendliness and reports that the state puts the 11th-highest burden on business owners in the country. Dayton said that leads directly to jobs moving out of the state.
“In 1980, we had about 130,000 manufacturing jobs in West Virginia. Today, we’re down around 47,000, and in that same time, Kentucky added that number of manufacturing jobs. It’s not that we lost them to other countries. We lost them across the border,” he said.
The WV Chamber hopes to use the numbers collected for the digest to better determine how West Virginia can attract and support business. The group is actively modeling how the business climate compares to surrounding states.
“That’s going to help, we hope, inform us to know what policy changes do need to be made and what needs to be done to make West Virginia the place they want to be and make West Virginia the place they want to stay,” Dayton said.
The 2026 Campaign for Jobs Digest is available in full at wvchamber.com.