New data shows New York’s workforce has shrunk by 300,000 since the start of the pandemic.

The Big Apple added jobs at a painfully slow pace last month as it struggles to cope with a post-pandemic downsizing of about 300,000, new data suggests.

The latest employment data shows that the city created 13,500 jobs in December, but that number still leaves Gotham about 12% less than even pre-pandemic levels, according to new labor statistics and analysis from The City.

New York City has been hardest hit by the pandemic and lost a total of almost 1 million jobs in March and April 2020, with the biggest leak occurring in Manhattan. It currently employs just over 4 million people.

“The loss of jobs in the city as of fall 2022 — two and a half years after the start of the pandemic — is mainly due to a decline in employment in low-wage, direct industries, which have been hardest hit by health care business restrictions. and are subject to the lingering effects of altered commuting and hybrid work patterns,” according to a just-published study by The New School and others.

According to a report released late last year by City Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office, the Big Apple’s public workforce has taken a noticeable hit, experiencing the largest decline in the number of employees, or 6.4%, since the “Great Recession of 2008”.

The report said that in November, the number of vacancies in the city government was still more than 21,000.

The high employment rate in Gotham only confirms the city’s previous dire predictions that Apple won’t return to pre-pandemic levels for at least a few years.

The mayor’s budget office said it does not expect the city to reach the same employment benchmark before the end of 2024. Gov. Katie Hochul is even more skeptical, predicting last summer that this could happen before 2026.

The study found that the city’s worst-hit industries continue to be hospitality, retail and construction, while warehousing is best recovering.

The researchers say the main reason for the shrinking workforce is that people are simply leaving for “the suburbs, upstate or somewhere else.”

As The Post reported on Thursday, for example, more New Yorkers fled to Florida last year than in any other year in history, escaping Empire State’s high taxes and crime rate.

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in the Big Apple also continued to rise in the past month. It reached 5.9%, up 0.1% from November and 1.6% higher than the state as a whole, according to new data.

The city’s unemployment rate of nearly 6% was also significantly higher than the country’s overall rate of 3.5%.

However, the city’s figures are down 1.5% from December 2021, new data show.

According to the study and Gothamist, urban blacks suffered the highest unemployment rate in the last quarter among people of color, or 9.8%.

Unemployment rates among Hispanics in urban areas have topped 7%, while Asians have been hit twice as much as before, at about 5%.

These numbers compare to 3.5 percent for whites.

The study says that the least educated people also suffer more than others.

According to statistics, people with no higher than average degrees were 25% more likely to lose their jobs during the pandemic.

The disturbing news came as average office occupancy at least rose again after the holidays to around 47 percent until around December, The City reported.

However, that figure doesn’t look likely to rise anytime soon, raising concerns about the city’s tax revenue and corporate real estate market.