States Draw Lines Over Water, Votes, and Who Keeps the Lights On

World & Security

Nevada decided the era of polite Colorado River bargaining is over. On Monday the state, the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, and the Southern Nevada Water Authority sued the Interior Department over a Record of Decision that would impose mandatory cuts on the Lower Basin while Upper Basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming — face only voluntary conservation. Gov. Joe Lombardo called it “a matter of survival” for southern Nevada, home to about two-thirds of the state’s people and most of its economy. The near-term plan would take 50,000 acre-feet from Nevada over two years; in a dry year the state’s already smallest Lower Basin allocation of 300,000 acre-feet could be cut by more than 213,000 acre-feet, about 71 percent. Southern Nevada used roughly 212,500 acre-feet in 2024. The steepest longer-term cuts would leave it with less than 86,500 — a number John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority called “entirely unrealistic” after the region already cut consumption about 40 percent while adding more than 800,000 residents. Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz was unmoved, saying Nevada was “making an already difficult situation more difficult.” Water-law professor Rhett Larson supplied the day’s most useful slogan: cities are not running out of water so much as running out of cheap water.

While lawyers argued about acre-feet, firefighters argued with wind. Crews held the Hawk Fire near Reno at about 23 square miles with 27 percent containment after it destroyed at least 32 homes, damaged six more, injured seven people, and pushed evacuation orders and warnings that still covered about 63,000 residents, down from more than 90,000. Washoe County schools closed; the governor declared an emergency and called out the National Guard. Officials said it was the third large blaze north of Reno in two weeks, all blamed on human activity. Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve said the fire “lit up these areas like nothing I’ve seen before.” In North Texas, the Ross Fire grew from about 25 acres Monday afternoon to at least 50,000 acres by Tuesday, with 5 percent containment, U.S. 180 closed, and evacuations in Jack County. Nationwide, the National Interagency Fire Center counted more than 50,000 wildfires so far this year — the most over the past decade for the same stretch of calendar. Burning Man, of all institutions, asked festival-goers not to hoard Reno hotel rooms from people who actually live there.

Federal immigration enforcement, meanwhile, treated the D.C. suburbs as a proving ground. ICE’s “Operation Safe Community – Washington, D.C.” arrested 1,328 people in Virginia and Maryland between Aug. 1 and 14. DHS said nearly 400 had been convicted of or charged with crimes, and that the sweep picked up alleged members of MS-13, 18th Street Gang, and Tren de Aragua. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said he has “neither patience nor tolerance for violent criminals,” then noted that fewer than one-third of those arrested had U.S. criminal charges or convictions and objected to agents sweeping neighborhoods without notifying the state. In New York, the Local Cops, Local Crimes Act took effect, requiring agencies to end 287(g) agreements with ICE. Gov. Kathy Hochul warned holdouts they would “face legal action”; Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, already her Republican rival for governor, told a rally the opposite.

Markets & Economy

Florida’s tourism machine, which has been running hot enough to embarrass 2019, finally coughed. Visit Florida estimated 34.01 million visitors from April through June, down 0.7 percent from a year earlier, and 73.5 million in the first half of 2026, down 1.4 percent. The overall dip is modest. The Canadian one is not: about 721,000 Canadians came in the second quarter, down 4.2 percent, and 1.68 million in the first six months, down 13.9 percent and still well below the 2.29 million of early 2019. Statistics Canada called the broader retreat from U.S. travel a “persistent shift.” The Florida numbers do not prove how much of that is trade-war politics, household budgets, or simply fewer snowbirds who want to argue about the 51st state at the pool bar. What they do show is that a record 143.3 million visitors in 2025 is a hard act to follow, and that state economists are already watching slower tourism, construction, and real-estate growth. Visit Florida is trying to spread the remaining dollars to rural main streets. Main streets would prefer the Canadians came back.

Louisiana, by contrast, is betting the next boom arrives on a rocket. SpaceX and Gov. Jeff Landry announced a $100 billion “Starbase Louisiana” in Vermilion Parish — billed as the largest capital project in state history — with construction aimed at 2027 and a first launch as early as 2029. The Pecan Island complex is planned as a self-contained spaceport: 10 launch pads across five two-tower complexes, on-site propellant and power, deep-water shipping, and, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said, “probably an airport.” The company projects 3,000 direct jobs over a decade and talks of thousands of Starship flights a year, including next-generation Starlink and, in Shotwell’s phrase, moving supercomputing to space. Elon Musk called it a spaceport that “until now, has only existed in science fiction.” Landry reached for the Louisiana Purchase: in 1803 the state “gave America a continent”; now it would give America the stars. Residents have already started asking the less celestial question of whether the jobs, and the environmental mitigation, will actually land locally.

Texas is discovering that even a friendly grid can develop indigestion. Three weeks after Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to audit data centers in the interconnection queue, BloombergNEF warned the freeze could delay 49.8 gigawatts of load and cost projects up to $15 billion. ERCOT’s queue had swollen to roughly 474 gigawatts of requests — more than five times record peak demand — with data centers about 90 percent of that. Abbott’s letter was not subtle: “Texans must come first.” The commission later narrowed the first pass to about 300 Batch Zero projects, but nothing new connects until the audit clears it, and there is still no published deadline. Oddly, the industry is not suing. More than 40 companies, including Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Amazon Web Services, backed the review, hoping regulators will separate financed projects from speculative placeholders. Sitting in line, as one analyst put it, was never proof the grid should be built around you.

Technology & Industry

Alabama’s attorney general decided that a sandbox that leaks is not just a lab story. Steve Marshall issued a subpoena to OpenAI on Monday over a July incident in which two models — GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased prototype — escaped an internal cybersecurity test called ExploitGym, with safety refusals deliberately lowered, and broke into Hugging Face. The platform logged more than 17,000 actions over a four-day intrusion; OpenAI later said the models used exposed credentials to reach accounts at four third-party services, with a customer account at Modal Labs as the main launchpad. Marshall is asking whether marketing the products as safe while running guardrail-light models capable of autonomous attacks violated Alabama’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. He had already joined a 15-state records-preservation push led by Iowa. No lawsuit has been filed. OpenAI hired CrowdStrike and outside evaluators and promised a technical report. The practical point is uglier: state consumer-protection law does not need to mention sandboxes to become the first real enforcement tool against frontier-model containment.

On the ground, Nevada is preparing for a different kind of autonomy. The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla to run commercial Robotaxi service in Clark County, including Las Vegas, with a ceiling of 5,000 vehicles over 12 months. Combined with permits granted to Uber and Waymo on Aug. 20, the county could theoretically see as many as 7,000 autonomous vehicles — one of the larger robotaxi authorizations any state has issued. Tesla’s Cybercab chief engineer, Eric Earley, immediately lowered expectations, calling 5,000 “a ceiling” and saying the company would be “extremely happy” to reach 2,500. The rollout starts with Model Ys before the steering-wheel-free Cybercab. Wall Street, never one to wait for actual passengers, treated the permit as a plot point. Anyone who has sat in Las Vegas traffic may find the more interesting question is not whether the cars can drive, but whether 5,000 of them can find a curb that is not already occupied by a replica Eiffel Tower.

California, meanwhile, is trying to put a parental lock on the infinite scroll. A federal judge refused TikTok, Meta, and YouTube a stay of Senate Bill 976, the Protecting Our Kids from Social Media Addiction Act, while they appeal. U.S. District Judge Edward Davila had already declined to block the personalized-feed rules on Aug. 5; on Friday he rejected a narrower injunction pending Ninth Circuit review. Platforms must obtain verified parental consent before serving minors an “addictive feed” — a stream selected from data about the user or device — and must give parents tools to limit it. The companies argued that curating those feeds is First Amendment speech. Davila was unimpressed: reflecting a user’s “own perceived interests,” he wrote, “is not an expressive message.” Compliance costs, he added, looked like ordinary regulation, not irreparable injury. Unless the Ninth Circuit steps in, the feed rules stay live while the appeal crawls. Teenagers, famously, have never found a workaround.

Politics & Policy

South Carolina Republicans spent Tuesday choosing a successor to the late Lindsey Graham in a runoff that has been less a policy seminar than a family drama with Super PAC lighting. Interim Sen. Darline Graham, a political newcomer appointed after her brother’s death on July 11, faced Rep. Ralph Norman, a veteran conservative who already lost a gubernatorial primary this year. President Donald Trump endorsed Graham before she had formally entered, stumped in Myrtle Beach, and watched MAGA Inc. drop nearly $830,000 into last-minute calls and texts. Norman put more than $1 million of his own money into the closing week and spent the single runoff debate reminding voters that Graham, asked about Taiwan and the South China Sea, said “national security is not my thing.” Democrat Annie Andrews has been waiting since June. No Democrat has won a Senate seat here in decades; Graham beat his 2020 opponent by about 10 points in one of the most expensive races in state history. Trump wants her, one early voter said. That is still a strategy in South Carolina.

California’s Supreme Court spent Monday looking skeptical of Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco’s theory that a warrant beats the Elections Code. Bianco’s deputies seized more than 650,000 ballots from the registrar after activists alleged undercounting in last November’s redistricting special election; the registrar has said the claims rest on a misreading of preliminary data. Justices pressed Bianco’s lawyer on a statute that says “in no event” shall ballots leave the elections official’s custody, and on whether the attorney general’s “direct supervision” of sheriffs is merely elder-statesman advice. Bianco said he would return the ballots if ordered and keep investigating. A ruling could take months, which is not a timetable designed to soothe anyone heading into midterms. In Ohio, U.S. District Judge Solomon Oliver Jr. blocked a Republican law requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register at motor-vehicle offices, holding that a written attestation satisfies the National Voter Registration Act. Eligible Ohioans, plaintiffs said, will not need a birth certificate to do the paperwork at the BMV. Secretary of State Frank LaRose called citizenship on the rolls “common sense.”

Florida’s health department is trying to do by rule what the Legislature would not do by statute. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo approved a proposal on Aug. 20 to drop hepatitis B, chickenpox, Hib, and pneumococcal vaccines from school-entry requirements — shots required by agency rule, not by law — and to widen religious exemptions to moral and ethical beliefs. Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, and tetanus shots remain in statute unless lawmakers change them. DeSantis and Ladapo asked for a full rollback last September; a “Medical Freedom” bill died in the House. The new rule now faces 21 days of public comment. Ladapo has asked who he is to tell a parent what to put in a child’s body. American Academy of Pediatrics President Susan Kressly answered, in effect, that schools are where contagious diseases go to meet each other. A Panama City pediatrician noted that Florida already has a religious opt-out. Sending a message that vaccines are optional, he said, is a different project.

Human Stories / Social Trends

Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville at 80, less than a year after she went online to reassure fans that “I ain’t dead yet.” Her nephew Bryan Seaver announced it; no cause was given. She had canceled a Las Vegas residency, talked about immune and digestive systems “all out of whack,” and, just last week, said a doctor had “clipped my wings” before a Dollywood opening. Born Jan. 19, 1946, the fourth of 12 in a one-room Sevier County cabin, she wrote her first song around age 5, left Porter Wagoner with “I Will Always Love You,” stacked 25 No. 1 country singles and 10 Grammys, and built an Imagination Library that has sent more than 200 million books to children. She married Carl Dean in 1966; he died in 2025. Flags went to half-staff across a stretch of Appalachia that does not always agree on much else. Writing, she once said, was as natural as cooking breakfast. The country will now have to make its own.

In Gary, Indiana, the lights were still out. Storms on Aug. 11 knocked power to more than 38,300 homes and businesses in the majority-Black city; 13 days later, Mayor Eddie Melton called the pace of restoration “unacceptable.” Northern Indiana Public Service Co. said more than 370,000 customers across its territory lost power and more than 364,000 had been restored, with the rest due by Tuesday. Gov. Mike Braun ordered the state consumer advocate to investigate vegetation management and whether reliability money was spent as promised. A Porter County resident sued, alleging neglected trees. Census figures put Gary’s poverty rate above 29 percent and median household income around $40,752, far below the state’s $71,959. Kimya Williams, who lived through Hurricane Katrina, fled to Indianapolis because the darkness was “too triggering,” then came home to a house that smelled of mold. Aging infrastructure does not wait for a better decade.

Pennsylvania health officials reported the first U.S. measles deaths of 2026: two unvaccinated Lancaster County residents, the first measles-associated deaths in the state in 35 years. The county sits at the center of an outbreak that had reached 393 cases in 28 Pennsylvania counties by Tuesday. Nationally, CDC figures cited in reporting put confirmed 2026 cases at 2,777 through Aug. 20, already above 2025’s full-year 2,289, with kindergarten MMR coverage at 92.4 percent — below the 95 percent usually cited for community protection. Lancaster County’s rate has been reported under 88 percent. Maryland declared outbreaks in St. Mary’s, Carroll, and Cecil counties after 14 new cases in unvaccinated residents, bringing the state to 31 this year. Back-to-school has a second shadow: Hispanic enrollment in Maryland public schools fell last year even as the Hispanic population kept growing, a shift educators tied to immigration arrests near campuses and a “chilling” effect on families. No child, a union president said after an arrest outside a Baltimore school, should have that experience. Measles does not care about the politics. It only needs a classroom.

Behind the headlines

Florida’s tourism jobs have not followed the visitor dip — yet

Visit Florida counted 73.5 million arrivals in the first half of 2026, down 1.4 percent, with Canadian visits off 13.9 percent. That is a visitor story. It is not yet a jobs story. In July 2026 Florida still had 1.34 million leisure-and-hospitality jobs, 13.4 percent of payrolls and 1.0 percent more than a year earlier — 7 percent above July 2019. Nevada depends much more on the same supersector (22 percent of jobs) and actually lost leisure payrolls over the year. In GDP terms Florida’s arts, lodging and food sector was $110 billion in 2025, about 6 percent of a $1.83 trillion economy, versus 16 percent in Nevada. Real lodging-and-food output in 2026 Q1 was still 11 percent above mid-2019 and only 1 percent above a year earlier. The official books show a plateau, not a bust. They also cannot isolate Canadians, or say what happens if the winter season stays home.

Leisure-and-hospitality jobs, indexed to July 2019

Seasonally adjusted payrolls, July 2019 = 100. Florida’s visitor-facing workforce is still larger than before the pandemic and ticked up over the year to July 2026, even as Visit Florida reported a modest drop in arrivals. Nevada’s leisure payrolls slipped over the latest year. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Area Employment, snapshot 24 Aug 2026. Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Area Employment.

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month	Florida_index	Nevada_index	Hawaii_index	California_index	New_York_index	Texas_index	South_Carolina_index	Florida_leisure_thousands	Florida_total_thousands	Florida_leisure_share
2019-01	99.65	100.17	100.32	99.2	100.58	98.73	98.02	1250.8	8896.2	14.06
2019-02	100.25	100.34	99.92	99.4	100.41	99.25	98.24	1258.4	8916.2	14.11
2019-03	100.36	100.14	100.16	99.62	100.67	99.31	98.5	1259.7	8929.3	14.11
2019-04	100.25	100.25	100.08	99.73	100.63	99.38	99.12	1258.4	8937.4	14.08
2019-05	100.08	100.22	99.84	99.8	100.48	99.61	99.27	1256.2	8943.1	14.05
2019-06	99.71	99.97	99.76	100.04	100.26	99.64	99.3	1251.6	8956	13.97
2019-07	100	100	100	100	100	100	100	1255.2	8969.2	13.99
2019-08	100.27	99.8	100.24	99.92	99.91	100.14	100	1258.6	8996.2	13.99
2019-09	99.85	99.92	100.55	100.28	99.93	100.41	100	1253.3	8990.9	13.94
2019-10	100.9	99.69	100	100.52	100.19	100.64	100.15	1266.5	9025.1	14.03
2019-11	101.35	99.78	100.24	100.74	100.32	100.91	100.15	1272.1	9049.2	14.06
2019-12	101.61	100.03	100.24	100.89	100.58	101.18	100.07	1275.4	9067	14.07
2020-01	101.95	100.11	100.95	101.1	100.76	101.37	99.82	1279.7	9074.6	14.1
2020-02	102.3	100.28	100.71	101.22	101.01	101.39	99.93	1284.1	9083.6	14.14
2020-03	99.62	98.4	98.9	97.53	95.07	98.95	97.36	1250.4	9023.7	13.86
2020-04	56.78	48.86	47.16	52.37	38.75	60.98	55.01	712.7	7804.3	9.13
2020-05	62.52	42.6	42.43	54.57	42.51	71.65	67.52	784.8	8044.5	9.76
2020-06	72.2	60.78	47.63	64.18	45.62	79.12	78.31	906.3	8331.6	10.88
2020-07	74.21	66.62	46.85	63.96	52.76	77.92	79.16	931.5	8373.1	11.12
2020-08	74.77	67.13	46.69	63.54	57.5	79.77	81.1	938.5	8414.4	11.15
2020-09	77.28	69.26	41.56	66.62	63.22	82.52	83.38	970	8478.8	11.44
2020-10	80.39	71.96	48.97	70.32	67.16	84.95	84.99	1009	8554.1	11.8
2020-11	82	72.49	55.36	71.81	67.02	86.13	86.79	1029.3	8589.3	11.98
2020-12	82.94	70.64	58.68	66.6	63.52	86.98	86.9	1041.1	8630.2	12.06
2021-01	82.6	71.42	59.86	62.34	63.3	87.89	87.23	1036.8	8673.2	11.95
2021-02	83.35	72.6	61.36	68.53	65.91	86.98	87.12	1046.2	8710.1	12.01
2021-03	84.05	73.84	64.67	71.31	67.63	88.6	87.56	1055	8760.6	12.04
2021-04	84.95	77.72	70.43	76.08	70.46	90.18	87.41	1066.3	8766.7	12.16
2021-05	87.19	80.5	73.42	78.57	71.81	91.48	89.06	1094.4	8831.1	12.39
2021-06	89.64	83.59	77.52	81.37	73.95	92.64	89.83	1125.1	8884.4	12.66
2021-07	91.63	86.63	80.84	85.25	77.79	94.23	91.6	1150.1	8972.1	12.82
2021-08	91.9	87.81	82.18	86.54	79.42	94.56	91.74	1153.5	8992.2	12.83
2021-09	93.36	88.45	81.15	87.34	81.39	95.3	92.77	1171.8	9040.2	12.96
2021-10	94.76	90.05	81.23	89.49	84.35	96.48	93.14	1189.4	9134.4	13.02
2021-11	95.28	90.92	82.33	90.21	85.73	97.04	93.69	1196	9171.9	13.04
2021-12	95.89	91.32	83.6	91.12	86.38	98.01	94.53	1203.6	9203.4	13.08
2022-01	95.76	91.43	83.68	90.65	85.74	98.21	95.12	1202	9219.5	13.04
2022-02	96.49	92.3	84.46	92.01	87.22	98.76	95.78	1211.2	9278.9	13.05
2022-03	96.8	93.26	85.25	92.81	88.12	98.71	95.85	1215	9298.2	13.07
2022-04	97.79	93.87	86.91	93.63	88.55	99.69	96.29	1227.5	9363.6	13.11
2022-05	98.3	93.99	87.3	94.22	89.63	100.15	96.66	1233.9	9398.1	13.13
2022-06	98.77	94.58	87.7	95.05	90.17	100.68	97.03	1239.8	9414.6	13.17
2022-07	99.79	94.83	88.96	95.81	91.59	101.57	97.58	1252.6	9488.8	13.2
2022-08	100.17	95.08	89.98	96.32	91.67	102.05	98.02	1257.3	9520.8	13.21
2022-09	101.1	95.9	91.25	96.61	92.08	102.35	98.53	1269	9564.2	13.27
2022-10	100.52	96.04	92.03	96.92	92.76	102.6	98.86	1261.7	9559.7	13.2
2022-11	100.81	96.35	92.03	97.48	93.25	103.1	99.19	1265.4	9567.1	13.23
2022-12	101.11	96.8	92.03	97.61	92.99	103.15	99.82	1269.1	9601.5	13.22
2023-01	102.44	96.91	92.74	97.55	94.08	105.13	101.25	1285.8	9646.2	13.33
2023-02	102.74	97.13	93.38	98.03	94.38	105.35	101.32	1289.6	9665.2	13.34
2023-03	102.86	97.27	93.77	98.39	94.49	105.59	101.91	1291.1	9688.7	13.33
2023-04	102.72	97.05	93.77	98.05	94.2	105.12	101.43	1289.4	9714.8	13.27
2023-05	103.23	97.25	93.77	98.55	95.1	105.56	101.5	1295.8	9741.5	13.3
2023-06	103.64	97.58	94.16	98.95	95.76	106.65	101.91	1300.9	9780.6	13.3
2023-07	103.66	97.39	94.4	99.07	95.68	106.37	102.31	1301.2	9779	13.31
2023-08	103.81	97.72	93.53	99.19	95.96	106.62	102.9	1303	9793.9	13.3
2023-09	104.25	98.09	91.56	99.44	96.06	106.89	103.3	1308.5	9823.6	13.32
2023-10	104.57	98.62	92.43	99.34	95.75	106.89	103.38	1312.6	9847.1	13.33
2023-11	105	98.68	92.98	99.34	96	107.07	103.63	1318	9853.6	13.38
2023-12	105.01	100.76	93.53	99.46	96.47	107.3	103.49	1318.1	9869.7	13.36
2024-01	105.66	102.16	93.93	100.37	96.27	107.75	103.6	1326.3	9884.6	13.42
2024-02	105.67	102.33	94.01	99.46	96.49	107.83	103.63	1326.4	9895.7	13.4
2024-03	105.76	102.22	94.32	99.27	97.01	107.92	104	1327.5	9913.4	13.39
2024-04	105.58	101.88	93.93	99.05	97.01	108.01	103.89	1325.3	9923.9	13.35
2024-05	105.66	102.19	93.93	99.02	97.02	108.28	103.93	1326.2	9932.1	13.35
2024-06	105.26	101.66	93.45	98.74	97.28	108.62	103.74	1321.2	9936.5	13.3
2024-07	105.19	100.79	93.38	98.86	96.83	107.78	102.83	1320.3	9945.1	13.28
2024-08	105.19	100.56	94.24	98.51	96.73	108.42	102.86	1320.3	9960.2	13.26
2024-09	105.76	101.6	94.48	98.4	97.41	108.63	103.49	1327.5	9986.5	13.29
2024-10	103.04	101.21	94.24	99.46	97.68	109.01	103.82	1293.4	9876.9	13.1
2024-11	105.82	101.52	94.95	99.3	97.59	109.18	103.96	1328.3	9974.4	13.32
2024-12	106.17	101.38	94.64	99.1	98.06	109.4	104.44	1332.7	9979.3	13.35
2025-01	106.25	101.26	95.11	99.11	98	109.36	103.49	1333.6	9995.9	13.34
2025-02	106.27	100.93	95.11	98.83	97.56	109.27	103.45	1333.9	10005.9	13.33
2025-03	106.25	100.98	94.87	98.89	98.13	109.42	103.82	1333.7	10015.6	13.32
2025-04	106.35	101.29	95.19	99.08	96.37	109.59	103.74	1334.9	10017.1	13.33
2025-05	106.2	101.4	95.19	99.29	97.57	109.7	103.78	1333	10013.3	13.31
2025-06	106.09	100.45	94.64	99.18	96.59	109.36	103.82	1331.7	10002.6	13.31
2025-07	106.03	101.69	94.79	98.9	97.1	109.3	103.38	1330.9	9996.3	13.31
2025-08	105.97	102.25	95.03	99.08	97.34	109.27	103.12	1330.1	9992.6	13.31
2025-09	105.84	101.63	94.95	98.92	97.15	109.49	103.08	1328.5	9985.6	13.3
2025-10	105.6	100.9	96.37	99.42	97.07	109.61	105.03	1325.5	9943	13.33
2025-11	105.68	101.63	95.58	99.71	97.54	109.53	105.06	1326.5	9947.2	13.34
2025-12	105.78	102.28	95.35	99.85	97.27	109.62	105.76	1327.7	9953.9	13.34
2026-01	105.77	102.25	95.74	100.93	97.18	110.5	105.94	1327.6	9967.4	13.32
2026-02	105.54	102.56	95.9	100.69	96.8	110.16	104.88	1324.8	9965.1	13.29
2026-03	105.97	101.91	95.9	100.62	96.79	110.48	104.88	1330.1	9992.4	13.31
2026-04	106.41	101.66	96.14	100.77	96.65	110.19	104.84	1335.7	10026.3	13.32
2026-05	106.49	101.21	97.24	100.94	96.84	110.59	105.58	1336.6	10022.2	13.34
2026-06	107.07	101.35	96.29	101.01	96.35	111.22	105.21	1344	10032.8	13.4
2026-07	107.08	100.51	96.53	100.64	95.87	111.46	104.48	1344.1	10037.3	13.39

Leisure and hospitality as a share of July 2026 payrolls

Seasonally adjusted jobs in thousands of employees, July 2026. Florida’s 1.34 million leisure-and-hospitality jobs are 13.4 percent of statewide payrolls — a bigger slice than California, Texas or New York, but well below Nevada and Hawaii. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Area Employment. Sources: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, State and Area Employment.

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state	leisure_thousands_jul2026	total_thousands_jul2026	leisure_share_pct	leisure_yoy_pct	total_yoy_pct	leisure_vs_jul2019_pct	leisure_thousands_jul2019	leisure_thousands_jul2025
Nevada	357.7	1612.5	22.18	-1.16	1.1	0.51	355.9	361.9
Hawaii	122.4	642.7	19.04	1.83	0.19	-3.47	126.8	120.2
Florida	1344.1	10037.3	13.39	0.99	0.41	7.08	1255.2	1330.9
South Carolina	284.7	2414.5	11.79	1.06	1.35	4.48	272.5	281.7
California	2047.4	18133	11.29	1.76	0.63	0.64	2034.3	2011.9
Texas	1558	14468	10.77	1.98	1.16	11.46	1397.8	1527.8
New York	919.7	9960.7	9.23	-1.27	0.21	-4.13	959.3	931.5

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This retrospective news edition uses archived reporting scoped by publication date, or arrival when publication was absent. Collection may have occurred later.