There’s still plenty of competition for workers across the Buffalo Niagara region.

Even with nearly 12,000 new workers joining the local labor pool over the past two months, the vast majority of them have succeeded in finding jobs, according to data released Tuesday by the state Labor Department.

As a result, the region’s unemployment rate remained at an unusually low 3.3% during July, up slightly from 3.2% in June, but below the 3.8% jobless rate of a year ago.

The jobless rate during July was the lowest for that month since at least 1990 and is just the ninth time in the last 33 years that the monthly unemployment rate has been as low as 3.3%.

It’s typical for the unemployment rate to rise between May and July as students return home and look for summer jobs, but the increase this year of 0.2% was tied for the smallest since 2015, excluding the pandemic year of 2020, according to Labor Department data.

While the region has yet to regain all of the jobs that were lost during the Covid-19 pandemic – the region has roughly 13,500 fewer jobs than it did in February 2020 – the competition for available workers has intensified. And most workers who start looking for jobs, have been able to find one.

That has caused the region’s unemployment rate to drop even as the local labor pool has rebounded and now is even bigger than it was before the pandemic. In fact, the region’s labor force is bigger than it has been during any month since July 2018.

That’s an encouraging increase because the worker shortage has contributed to the region’s sluggish recovery from all the jobs that were lost during the pandemic.

Workers who had stopped looking for jobs often will start looking again if they feel they have a good chance of finding one.

Canisius University economist Julie Anna Golebiewski also has said some older workers who retired during the pandemic may be returning to work after the steep rise in prices over the past two years, which may be squeezing their now-fixed incomes.

The region’s labor force grew by more than 10% from May to July, but most of them were able to find jobs, with the number of employed people rising by a little more than 10,000. The number of local workers holding jobs is at its highest level for any month since December 2008, the Labor Department reported.

That allowed the unemployment rate to remain low, with the number of unemployed people growing by 700 but remaining near a historic low.