Unemployment Rate

The unemployment rate is the headline number for the labor market — the share of people who want a job and don't have one — and it's the input the Sahm Rule transforms. The Sahm card on this dashboard fires on the *change* in the 3-month average against the trailing-12-month low, which means it's silent on the absolute level: a flat 6% reads the same as a flat 3.5% to Sahm, even though one is recession-typical and the other is the tightest labor market in 50 years. This card surfaces the level itself. Watch zones to read it: sub-4% is post-1969 territory where wage pressure dominates Fed thinking and the labor market is structurally tight enough to drive inflation persistence; 4-5% is where NAIRU estimates cluster and the Fed considers the economy at full employment; 5-6% is where labor market deterioration is genuinely underway; 6%+ is recession territory in the post-1948 record (every NBER recession peaked above 6%, several above 9%). Direction-of-travel matters as much as the level — a flat 4.2% with employers complaining about labor shortages is a very different signal from 4.2% climbing from a 3.4% trough, even though Sahm catches both correctly. Pair with Sahm Rule (rate of change), Initial Claims (high-frequency leading), and JOLTS (employer demand) for the full labor-market picture: the four together tell you whether the labor market is tightening, holding, or breaking, and at what speed.