Unemployment Rate Calculator

Definition: Unemployment rate is the percentage of people in a labor force that are unemployed and have been available to work full time.

Unemployment Rate calculator will calculate the unemployment rate, all that's needed is how many people are in the labor force and the number of people that are unemployed.

Unemployment can vary from city to city or country to country. Various factors come into play such as the economy, job growth, ability to look for employment and population density can play a role. You can check out our Population Density Calculator to calculate population density of an area.

Unemployment Rate is often used as an economic statistic with the unemployment rate being a sign of how the economy is doing. If the unemployment rate is quite high, often means that the economy is in a recession.

In the US, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counts people that are employed as:

people who are aged 16 or older
working for an employer or are self-employed

The criteria for unemployed is:

Aged 16 or older
Not working for an employer and not self-Employed
Were available to work in the last four weeks and seeking a job during that time

Some countries may differ in how they define employed and unemployed people. There are also different forms of unemployment such as discouraged workers, these are people that have looked for a job and does not find employment after long-term unemployment. They have usually given up searching for a job or had no success in obtaining a job, this is where the term discouraged comes from.

Labor Force participation rate can give you another look at how the economy is doing, for calculating Labor Force Participation Rate you can use our Labor Force Participation Rate Calculator.

Unemployment Rate Formula: (Unemployed / Civilian Labor Force ) x 100.

How to calculate Unemployment Rate

Let's use an example, there are 55,432 US residents that are employed and 7,500 are unemployed. To find the unemployment rate we divide the unemployed by the total labor force. To get the total labor force we add the employed and unemployed.

Unemployment Rate: 7,500/(55,432+7,500) = 0.11917625373

Lets clean it up 0.11917625373 * 100 = 11.91 percent.

How to Use Unemployment Rate Calculator

Enter the size of the labor force.

Then enter the amount of people unemployed.