City's Jobless Rate Dips as Many People Stop Looking for Work New York City's unemployment rate dipped back below 9 percent in March, but most of the decline was caused by people dropping out of the work force, according to data released by the State Labor Department on Thursday. The city's unemployment rate had been 9.1 percent in January and February after ending 2012 at 8.8 percent, its lowest point in a year and a half. Last month, it fell to 8.9 percent as the monthly survey of employers showed that the city added back almost all of the jobs lost in February. Still, the Labor Department said the annual rate of growth of private-sector jobs in the city, now at 1.8 percent, trailed the national growth rate of 1.9 percent. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has frequently pointed to a higher rate of job growth in the city as evidence that his policies have helped the economy. The national unemployment rate, at 7.6 percent in March, was much lower than the city's. New York State's unemployment rate dropped to 8.2 percent, from 8.4 percent in February. Barbara Byrne Denham, an economist with Eastern Consolidated, a real estate investment services firm in Manhattan, calculated that the city gained 14,500 jobs in March, after adjustments to the state data to smooth out the usual seasonal fluctuations in hiring and layoffs. Most of those gains resulted from the end of the strike by school bus drivers, which temporarily pulled down the number of jobs in February, Ms. Denham said. Over the last two months, the city has added just 500 private-sector jobs, she said. Ms. Denham noted, however, that the two surveys that contribute to the official monthly report on the job market continue to vary widely. The survey of employers shows a healthy rate of hiring, while the survey of residents indicates that far fewer people have returned to work in the past year. Indeed, the survey of residents shows that a smaller share of adults in the city were employed in March than at any time since the summer of 2011. Statewide, more than 785,000 residents were unemployed in March, and fewer than half of them were collecting benefits, the Labor Department said. Many New Yorkers have exhausted all of the unemployment insurance they were eligible for as Congress has trimmed the emergency benefits offered after the last recession.