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How Long a U.S. Job Search Takes
Average and median length of the current spell of unemployment, monthly, weeks
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
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Current Population Survey, seasonally adjusted. Spells still in progress, not completed ones. The survey raised its longest recordable spell from two to five years in 2011, which lifted the average a little from then on.
The average job seeker has been looking far longer than the typical one, because a long tail of people stuck out of work for many months pulls the average up. Both measures climb after recessions and fall only slowly as hiring recovers.
What this chart reads
- U.S. Average Weeks Unemployedas “Average”latest 2026-09-01
- U.S. Median Weeks Unemployedas “Median”latest 2026-09-01
Sources
U.S. Average Weeks Unemployed. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, series UEMPMEAN ("Average Weeks Unemployed"; BLS LNS13008275). Palanor pulls it from the FRED API (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) nightly. Bureau of Labor Statistics data are in the public domain.
U.S. Median Weeks Unemployed. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, series UEMPMED ("Median Weeks Unemployed"). Palanor pulls it from the FRED API (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis) nightly. Bureau of Labor Statistics data are in the public domain.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.