U-6 Underemployment Rate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics put U-6 at 7.7% for August 2026. That is little changed from 7.9% in July 2026, a move too small to pass BLS's significance test. Over 12 months the rate is down from 8.1%.

U-6 starts from the jobless people counted in the headline Unemployment Rate and adds two groups. One is people marginally attached to the labor force: they want a job and are available for one, and they looked sometime in the past 12 months but not in the past four weeks. Discouraged workers, who stopped looking because they think no jobs exist, are one part of that group. The other is people working part time for economic reasons: they worked 1 to 34 hours in the survey week because their hours were cut or full-time work was not available, and they wanted full-time work. That count has its own page, Part-Time for Economic Reasons.

The rate is a share of the labor force plus the marginally attached, not of all Americans or of all workers. U-3 and U-6 are shares of different bases, and one of the added groups has jobs, so the gap between the two rates is not a count of hidden unemployed people. BLS treats U-3 as the official unemployment rate and publishes U-6 for readers who want a broader definition.

The figures are seasonally adjusted: BLS removes the swings that repeat every year, such as holiday hiring, so one month can be compared with the next. BLS also tests each month's change for sampling error. In August 2026 a one-month move in U-6 needed about 0.3 percentage point, and a 12-month move about 0.4 point, to count as a real change; smaller moves are described here as little changed. The household survey did not run in October 2025, during the federal government shutdown, so there is no U-6 figure for that month.