The number of government and banking jobs being made available in Washington State, US, has gone up, newly-released figures show.

Over the course of October, around 900 government jobs were created, alongside 700 and 600 in the information and financial services sectors respectively, the Employment Security Department (ESD) has revealed.

This helped the overall rate of unemployment across Washington to ease slightly to 9.3 per cent, meaning around 310,000 people in the state are out of work.

At the same time, however, employment prospects in a number of sectors continued to fall, with a further 2,900 job losses seen in the hospitality and leisure industry in October along with the 2,300 positions lost in manufacturing.

The ESD has also revealed that Washington suffered from a 4.1 per cent year-on-year fall in employment rates over the past year, compared to a national average of four per cent.

It was recently reported that around 5,600 jobs were created in Washington State through the government's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.