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Share of the Unemployed Out of Work Six Months or More
People unemployed 27 weeks or longer, as a share of all unemployed, monthly, %
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
Continuation · the recent trend, flattening · 30 days
Dashed: the projection from the latest reading. Shaded: the range about two in three outcomes land in. A projection, not a promise.
Current Population Survey, seasonally adjusted. Long-term unemployment is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ term for spells of 27 weeks or longer.
How many of the unemployed have been looking for half a year or longer. It hit a record after the 2008 financial crisis and spiked again after the 2020 lockdowns as temporary layoffs turned permanent.
What this chart reads
- U.S. Long-Term Unemployed Shareas “Unemployed 27 weeks or more”latest 2026-09-01
Sources
U.S. Long-Term Unemployed Share. Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, series LNS13025703 ("Of Total Unemployed, Percent Unemployed 27 Weeks & over"). 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.