Live civilian unemployment rate from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the OECD harmonized comparator. Monthly updates, primary-source citations.
Last reviewed: 2026-05-21
The headline US unemployment rate is the share of the civilian labor force that is jobless, actively looking for work, and available to start. It is published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a household survey of around 60,000 addresses. The value above reflects the most recently released observation pulled from FRED series UNRATE, with hourly cache refresh on this page.
Alongside the BLS headline number we show the OECD harmonized rate for the United States (FRED series LRHUTTTTUSM156S, 15+). The harmonized definition strips out cross-country measurement quirks so the US number can be put next to Germany, the UK, Japan, or any other OECD member without a methodological caveat. The two series usually move in lockstep; small gaps appear because the harmonized series covers ages 15 and over while the BLS headline covers 16 and over, and seasonal adjustment differs slightly.
Unemployment is a lagging indicator. Companies wait for confirmed weakness before cutting payrolls, and they wait for confirmed strength before adding them. Expect unemployment to keep falling after an expansion has plateaued, and to keep rising after the recovery has begun. Because of that lag, a single monthly tick — up or down — rarely tells you the regime has changed. The three-month moving average and the trend in continuing claims (FRED series ) usually arrive at the truth first.
CCSAThe Sahm Rule, published by macroeconomist Claudia Sahm, is one of the most cited recession-detection rules built on this series. It triggers when the three-month average unemployment rate rises by 0.5 percentage points or more relative to its prior 12-month low. The rule has flagged every postwar US recession in real time, although recent debates around 2024 noted that supply-side labor force re-entry can push the rate up without aggregate demand weakness. Use it as one input, not a verdict.
Unemployment trends drive Federal Reserve policy. The Fed has a dual mandate — price stability and maximum employment — and weakening labor markets are the trigger for rate cuts as much as cooling inflation is. When you see the rate climb persistently, the front of the yield curve usually starts pricing cuts, which feeds through to mortgage rates, auto loan rates, and HELOC rates within weeks. Track this number alongside the live rates dashboard and the commodity tracker to triangulate where the cycle is.
Source numbers come straight from BLS via the St. Louis Fed's FRED API. We re-fetch within minutes of release, persist the snapshot to a shared cache, and serve every visitor the same number. No interpolation, no projection. The CSV downloads on Kaggle mirror the same observation timeline plus enriched fields (labor force participation, prime-age employment ratio).
For developers: every value on this page is exposed via the CalcFi data API and the /data hub with the same caching contract. Build your own dashboard with one fetch.
The current US civilian unemployment rate is published monthly by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Employment Situation report. This tracker shows the latest value from FRED series UNRATE, refreshed within an hour of BLS release.
Unemployment rate = unemployed persons divided by civilian labor force, times 100. BLS sources the numerator and denominator from the monthly Current Population Survey of about 60,000 households.
OECD harmonized unemployment (FRED series LRHUTTTTUSM156S for the United States, 15 years and over) uses a common definition across OECD countries so cross-country comparisons are apples-to-apples. It can diverge slightly from the headline BLS rate because of age coverage and seasonal adjustment.
The BLS releases the Employment Situation on the first Friday of each month at 8:30 AM ET. The OECD harmonized series lags by about one month.
Unemployment is a lagging indicator. Labor markets adjust after output changes, so unemployment usually peaks several months after a recession ends and bottoms out late in an expansion.
Sources: FRED UNRATE · FRED LRHUTTTTUSM156S · BLS Employment Situation · Kaggle dataset.