UK Unemployment Rate

## What this measures

The share of economically active people aged 16 and over who are unemployed (no job, looking and available for work).

## Why it matters

It is the UK's headline labour-market number.

## How to read it

Compare three-month periods. It is defined the same way as the U.S. rate (ILO definition), so levels are broadly comparable.

## What it does not say

Labour Force Survey figures are three-month averages labelled by the last month, so they move slowly and lag. The survey has had low response rates since 2023 and ONS has warned that its estimates are less reliable; it is being replaced by a Transformed LFS.

## Source

Office for National Statistics, series MGSX (dataset LMS), "Unemployment rate (aged 16 and over, %): SA". Palanor reads it from the ONS website's time-series data every day.

Source: Office for National Statistics licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.