Restaurant and hotel jobs, September 2026
Denver-metro restaurants, bars, hotels and venues employed 176,600 people in September 2026, up 0.7% from a year earlier — 10.7% of all payroll jobs in the metro.
No other series on this site records 2020 as plainly. Employment in this sector fell from 168,000 in February 2020 to 86,600 in April 2020 — a drop of 48%, inside two months, in an industry that cannot be done from home — and its share of the region’s jobs fell to 6.4%. Everything to the right of that notch is the recovery.
The share chart is the longer story: from 8.7% when the series opens in January 1990 to a peak of 11.8% in July 2017.
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, Denver–Aurora–Centennial MSA, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The share is derived at read time. Auto-generated each build.