Prime-Age Employment Rate (25-54)

A month earlier, in July 2026, the rate was the same.

The rate divides employed people ages 25 to 54 by everyone in that age group, working or not, outside prisons, nursing homes and the military. Employed means working at least one hour for pay or profit in the survey week, being temporarily away from a job, or working 15 hours or more unpaid in a family business. It says nothing about hours, pay or whether the job is full time. Ages 25 to 54 leave out most students and retirees, so the rate is less affected by the population growing older.

The rate is seasonally adjusted, which removes the usual swings of the calendar. It comes from a sample survey, and BLS publishes no margin of error for this age group. For the employment rate of everyone 16 and older, a one-month change must exceed about 0.25 percentage point (a point on the percent scale, not a percent of the rate) to stand out from sampling error. By our estimate the margin for ages 25 to 54 is about 0.3 point. Smaller moves are described here as little changed.

Comparisons on this page start in 1994, when BLS redesigned the survey questionnaire. New population estimates arrive each January and are not carried back, so a December-to-January change partly reflects that update. The survey did not run in October 2025, during the federal government shutdown. BLS has also said that in April 2020 some people kept away from work by pandemic closures were counted as employed when they should have been counted as unemployed on temporary layoff, so the rate for that month is likely too high.

This is not the headline employment-population ratio in the monthly jobs report, which covers everyone 16 and older. It is also not the prime-age participation rate, which counts people looking for work as well as those working. The Unemployment Rate and U-6 Underemployment come from the same survey, and Nonfarm Payrolls counts jobs from a separate survey of employers.