People are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available for work. Persons who are not working and are waiting to be recalled to a job from which they have been temporarily laid off are also counted as unemployed.

The civilian labor force includes people who are currently working and people who are unemployed according to the above definition.

For more information about how the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment (and labor underutilization more broadly), see “How the Government Measures Unemployment” and “Measures of Labor Underutilization from the Current Population Survey.”