Unemployment rate
The share of the labor force that is jobless and actively seeking work, from the monthly household survey.
The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that is without a job and actively looking for work. It comes from the Current Population Survey, a household survey, rather than the employer survey behind nonfarm payrolls. The labor force counts people who are working or looking for work, so people who stop searching leave the count.
On our site, the rate is shown monthly with the change from the prior month. A move of 0.1 point can be noise; check the trend and the participation rate alongside it.
Traders care because the rate is central to the Fed's dual mandate with inflation, and a rising rate can push expectations toward cuts.
Worked example (illustrative numbers, not real data): 160 million people are in the labor force and 6.4 million of them are unemployed and seeking work. The rate is 6.4 divided by 160, or 4.0 percent. If 100,000 unemployed people stop searching and leave the labor force, the rate falls to about 3.9 percent without any new jobs.