Jobs are going up and more metro Atlantans are finding them.

The Georgia Department of Labor announced Thursday that metro Atlanta’s unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent in February.  That is down 0.4 percent from January and a full percentage point from a year ago.

“There were few layoffs across the board,” Georgia Labor Commissioner Mark Butler said. “But also we show job growth in February.”

6,400 jobs were added in metro Atlanta in February. Most of those are in the professional and business services field.

57,800 new jobs have popped up in the area since February 2012, an increase of 2.5 percent, the state reports.

“This is the most over the year job growth we have seen in a February since 2007,” Butler says.

Elsewhere across the state, the Athens area has the lowest jobless rate at 6.1 percent, while the Heart of Georgia-Altamaha region had the highest at 11.2 percent.

Meanwhile, Georgia’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for February was 8.6 percent, a tenth of a percentage point from January. The rate was 9.2 percent in February a year ago.