White Unemployment Rate

## What this measures

The unemployment rate for White workers, in percent, monthly, from the Current Population Survey. Unemployed people as a share of the labor force (people 16 and over who are working or actively looking for work). Seasonally adjusted.

## Why it matters

Breakdowns by race, ethnicity and sex show whether the labor market's gains and losses reach every group of workers, and how evenly a downturn falls. Some groups' rates move earlier and further than the headline in both directions, so the gap between them is itself a read on the cycle.

## How to read it

Higher is worse. Compare it with the national figure and with other groups over the same months rather than reading one group alone. Direction over three to six months matters more than a single month.

## What it does not say

The CPS is a monthly survey of about 60,000 households. Estimates for a single group rest on a smaller sample than the national figure, so they carry more sampling error, and a move of a few tenths in one month is often noise. BLS revises seasonally adjusted data each January. Differences between groups reflect many things at once, including age, education, industry and region; this series does not separate them. Race groups are as BLS defines them. Since 2003, White, Black or African American, and Asian cover people who reported that race alone; people who reported more than one race are counted separately. Hispanic or Latino is an ethnicity, and Hispanic people may be of any race, so the Hispanic series overlaps the race series and the groups do not add up to the total. Data before 2003 follow the race definitions then in use.

## Source

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, series LNS14000003 (seasonally adjusted). Retrieved through FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000003). Public domain (US government work); cite the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Refreshed nightly by fred-sync.