These Are the Top 10 Seasonal Jobs and Where to Find Them

places with the most holiday seasonal jobs

Black Friday of 2017 is over, and if you participated in the mayhem then you likely encountered dozens of inept, seasonal workers — some of the hundreds of thousands of employees only there for the holiday season to handle the surges in travel and shopping.

And according to our post-Black Friday study, many of these positions haven’t been filled: we found 301,677 active seasonal job listings nationwide.

“Oh by gosh, by golly,” you’re probably thinking if you’ve been listening to too much Christmas music, ”That’s a ton of people! Where are they working and what positions are they filling?” you’re probably thinking if you work in the careers space.

Never fear, we’ve got the answers:

A summary of our seasonal job findings:

Most of the jobs are in retail, but surprisingly there are a ton of driving jobs
States with lower unemployment rates tend to have more holiday jobs available
Naples, FL far and away has the most seasonal jobs (183 per 10,000 people)
Nevadan and Hawaiian cities individually have the fewest seasonal jobs

A note on methodology

This is pretty straightforward — we scraped our pool of 8 million job listings for all jobs mentioning “seasonal” in the posting title after Black Friday 2017.

We took our populations from the latest Census data, and eliminated cities with populations less than 10,000 and then ranked the cities and states accordingly, with charts showing jobs per 10,000 people.

States with lower unemployment have higher rates of holiday jobs

It may come as no surprise that retail workers and their managers take some of the top positions, but the taxi drivers and chauffeurs came as a bit of a surprise.

This could potentially be due to the high volume of people going to and from airports during this busy traveling season, but also because Lyft has a tendency to flood job posting boards with every type of label or tag possible, such as temporary, part-time, and seasonal.

It’s Vermont and Rhode Island with the win, but all of the flyover states are coming in close behind. There’s no telling why, but it’s interesting to note that, with a few exceptions, a high level of holiday jobs seems to be roughly similar to states’ unemployment rates.

It’s also worth noting that because they’re ranked by jobs per capita, the most populous states have a bit of an unfair disadvantage when it comes to the ranking.

Cities’ seasonal job rates are independent of states — except Nevada

Interestingly, the cities’ overall seasonal jobs ranking seems to be independent of the states’ performance.

Some of the cities with the largest number of holiday jobs per person are located in the states with the lowest rates — like Naples, replete with its dozen or so super boujee malls.

Not Nevada and its cities though. For whatever reason, Nevada just seems to be a terrible place to look for a job to make some extra cash for the holiday season.

Places With the Most Seasonal Holiday Jobs Per Person

Rank	State	Jobs Per 10,000 People
1	Vermont	19
2	Rhode Island	18
3	North Dakota	17
4	Iowa	17
5	South Dakota	17
6	Wyoming	16
7	New Hampshire	16
8	Utah	15
9	Massachusetts	14
10	Montana	14
11	Maine	13
12	Minnesota	13
13	West Virginia	12
14	Nebraska	12
15	Colorado	12
16	Hawaii	11
17	Idaho	11
18	Alaska	11
19	Tennessee	11
20	Kentucky	11
21	Wisconsin	11
22	Kansas	10
23	Mississippi	10
24	Indiana	10
25	New Mexico	10
26	Oklahoma	10
27	Delaware	9
28	Ohio	9
29	Connecticut	9
30	Arizona	9
31	Georgia	9
32	Missouri	9
33	Michigan	9
34	Arkansas	9
35	Illinois	9
36	Virginia	9
37	Maryland	8
38	South Carolina	8
39	Alabama	8
40	Pennsylvania	8
41	California	8
42	North Carolina	8
43	Oregon	8
44	Louisiana	8
45	Nevada	8
46	New Jersey	8
47	Washington	8
48	Florida	7
49	Texas	6
50	New York	5

Never miss an opportunity that’s right for you.

Author

David Luther

David Luther was the Content Marketing Editor for the Zippia Advice blog. He developed partnerships with external reporting agencies in addition to generating original research and reporting for the Zippia Career Advice blog. David obtained his BA from UNC Chapel Hill.

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