The US unemployment rate was 4.2% in September 2026, seasonally adjusted, down 0.2 percentage points from September 2025. These pages follow the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly unemployment rate from the Current Population Survey and turn it into statistics, charts and a lookup that anyone can use, cite and link to.
Updated 1 November 2026. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey. Figures are refreshed when BLS publishes new data.
The US unemployment rate was 4.2% in September 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with 4.1% in August 2026 and 4.4% a year earlier.
The last 24 months with changes in percentage points, a chart since 2000 and the full monthly series as a CSV.
42 key figures on US unemployment, each with its own link, plus yearly averages, records, recessions and recoveries from 2000 to 2025.
Copy-ready citations, two CSV files and a downloadable bar chart.
Enter any month or year since 1948, or compare two months, to see the US unemployment rate, how it compares with today and where it ranks.
944 months of official rates, from January 1948 to September 2026.
The files below are built from the same Bureau of Labor Statistics data as the pages and are updated daily with them. BLS data are in the public domain. You may reuse these files with credit to MastheadWire and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and a link to the page you used, under CC BY 4.0.
A dated snapshot of the monthly US unemployment rate, seasonally adjusted, from 1948 is archived as a research dataset with a permanent DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.23852499. Use it when you need a fixed version for a paper or report; the tracker above always has the latest rate.
Please credit "MastheadWire. Data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey." and link to the page you used. Each statistic and table row has its own anchor, so you can link straight to the figure you quote. Please keep the credit line on chart images. Seasonally adjusted figures for recent years are revised each January, so recent values can change.
