Glossary
Unemployment rate
The share of the labor force that is jobless, available and actively looking for work, published monthly for the US by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On this page
The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that has no job, is available to work and has looked for work in the past four weeks. In the US it comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly household survey and is released in the Employment Situation report, usually on the first Friday of the month. It is one of the two pillars of the Federal Reserve's mandate, so it moves interest-rate expectations and markets.
How it works
People who are not working and not looking, such as retirees, full-time students or those who have given up, are outside the labor force and do not count as unemployed.
Reading it well
The headline figure is the U-3 rate. The broader U-6 adds discouraged workers, others only loosely attached to the labor force, and people working part time who want full-time work, so it runs several points higher. The survey samples about 60,000 households, so a month-to-month change of 0.1 point is within the noise.
Unemployment lags the economy: it usually keeps rising after a recession ends. For context, the rate peaked at 14.8% in April 2020 during the pandemic, the highest since the series began in 1948, then fell below 4% by early 2022. Read it with the labor-force participation rate and payroll growth.