Unemployment rate
The share of the labour force that is without work but available for and seeking employment.
How it is measured
Labour force surveys following ILO definitions. The World Bank series uses ILO-modeled estimates for comparability.
Where the number came from
Unemployment became measurable only once it became politically intolerable. The International Labour Organization was founded in 1919, and through its International Conference of Labour Statisticians it gradually built the definition now used everywhere: the 1982 resolution fixed a person as unemployed if, in a short reference period, they were without work, currently available for work, and actively seeking it. All three conditions matter, and the third is the one that surprises people. Someone who has given up looking is not unemployed under this definition; they are outside the labour force entirely. This was a deliberate choice to make the statistic operational in a household survey, and it is why economists watch the participation rate alongside the unemployment rate. A falling unemployment rate can mean people found jobs, or it can mean they stopped looking.
Worked example: why Cambodia looks fully employed and South Africa does not
Our 2025 figures show South Africa at about 32.4 percent, Spain at roughly 10.4 percent, the United States and India both near 4.2 percent, Niger at about 0.4 percent and Cambodia at roughly 0.3 percent. Read as a ranking of labour-market health, this is nonsense: Cambodia and Niger are not eleven times better at employing people than the United States. What the low figures record is the ILO definition meeting an economy where most work is subsistence agriculture, family enterprise or informal trade. Someone farming half a hectare for their own household is employed under the definition, and someone with no prospect of a wage job is unlikely to be actively seeking one in the survey sense, so they leave the labour force rather than appear as unemployed. The statistic is not broken; it is measuring what it says it measures, and in a low-income economy that turns out not to be the thing you wanted to know. South Africa is the informative case at the other end: an economy formal enough that job-seeking is a meaningful activity, with structural unemployment that the survey therefore captures rather than absorbs. Read alongside GDP per capita and the urban share, the low figures start to make sense; read alone, they mislead.
Figures read from our own unemployment rate table; each row there carries its observation year and whether it came from a live feed or the frozen archive.
Our data source
World Bank WDI (SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS, ILO modeled); IMF WEO where missing.
Refresh cadence: Annual; taken on each rebuild.
What to watch for
Informal economies make this slippery: a farmer scraping subsistence counts as employed. Cross-country comparisons of low-income countries often say more about informality than job markets.
CIA World Factbook equivalent field: "Unemployment rate" (frozen at the January 2026 final edition; our figures continue from live sources).