The downstate region accounted for 88 percent of New York State’s private sector job growth during the 12 months ending in July, according to the latest monthly employment report from the state Labor Department.

New York City remained the state’s fastest-growing metro area, adding jobs at a 3 percent annual clip, compared to a 0.8 percent growth rate upstate.* The Big Apple accounted for 101,000 of the 140,600 net additional private jobs created in New York State in the past year; Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley accounted for another 22,600.

The only metro area in the state to lose jobs during the 12-month period was Syracuse, with a decline of 1.2 percent, while the Elmira area had no net job gain. As detailed in the Labor Department table at the bottom of this post, other regions with exceptionally weak growth were Putnam-Rockland-Westchester, Glens Falls and Binghamton. The only upstate metro area to exceed the statewide growth rate was Kingston.

The statewide private-sector job employment gain of 1.9 percent trailed the national growth of 2.2 percent during the same period, but was New York’s strongest 12-month improvement since the annual statistical re-benchmarking of labor data in January. On a seasonally adjusted basis, New York State’s one-month gain in jobs in July matched the national pace of 0.2 percent, equivalent to a 2.4 percent annual growth rate by that measure. (The seasonally adjusted data are not broken down by metro area on a monthly basis.)

* Excluding Dutchess and Orange counties, which the Labor Department counts as “upstate.”