New state data show Deschutes County posted higher job gains to end 2012 than first reported, offering some glimpses of an economic recovery for a county that has seen 54 straight months of double-digit unemployment.

About 61,680 Deschutes County residents were employed in nonfarm jobs to end the year, according to the Employment Department’s Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, released April 22.

That’s an upward revision of 860 jobs. The Employment Department had initially put the year-end count at 60,820 jobs.

The department releases employment counts every month for the state’s 36 counties. To get those counts, the department takes a sampling of job numbers from various businesses and comes up with projected employment levels by industry.

But the quarterly numbers offer a much more accurate picture, said Damon Runberg, regional economist with the Employment Department. That report compiles job counts from about 96 percent of businesses in each county.

The leisure and hospitality sector drove much of the gain in Deschutes County, with jobs like food service and hotel work on the upswing. The quarterly report put the year-end leisure and hospitality job count at 9,359, up from the 8,830 jobs initially reported.

“The tourism industry in Bend seems to be back,” said Josh Lehner, an economist with the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis, who highlighted the revised figures in a recent blog post.

The quarterly report also shows a 177-job upward revision in manufacturing and a slightly improved count for construction.

“The unemployment rate is going down not just because people are leaving the workforce,” Lehner said. “We’ve seen it on a sustained basis now for a handful of months.”

To be sure, Deschutes County has a long way to go to reach prerecession job levels. The county peaked at 70,309 jobs in mid-2007.

But the modest growth seems to follow several years of job stagnation in the county. Employment is up 8.1 percent from the depth of the recession.

The rise comes as areas of the state outside of Portland start posting solid job gains for the first time in more than three years. The Portland metro area drove most of the state’s job growth throughout 2011 and early 2012, Lehner said. But Deschutes and Jackson counties — two regions especially hard-hit by the real estate crash — started showing stronger gains last summer.

An uptick in homebuilding activity could further bolster the construction job count. The 452 permits issued for single-family homes in Bend last year exceeded levels for 2010 and 2011 combined.

Those permits haven’t translated to a big upswing in jobs yet. Many building companies have handled the new activity by extending hours for existing workers instead of hiring new, Lehner said.

But that won’t last forever, if the building uptick continues.

“We’re just reaching that tipping point,” he said. “We should see some more of those (construction) jobs coming later this year, and certainly next year.”