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Data

Unemployment rate

See all data and research on:
Economic Growth

What you should know about this indicator

Unemployment rate can be defined by either the national definition, the ILO harmonized definition, or the OECD harmonized definition. The OECD harmonized unemployment rate gives the number of unemployed persons as a percentage of the labor force (the total number of people employed plus unemployed). [OECD Main Economic Indicators, OECD, monthly] As defined by the International Labour Organization, unemployed workers are those who are currently not working but are willing and able to work for pay, currently available to work, and have actively searched for work. [ILO, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/bureau/stat/res/index.htm]

Unemployment rate
Unemployment refers to the share of the labor force that is without work but available for and seeking employment.
Source
International Monetary Fund (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 25, 2025
Next expected update
April 2026
Date range
1980–2024
Unit
%

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The World Economic Outlook (WEO) database contains selected macroeconomic data series from the statistical appendix of the report of the same name, which presents the IMF staff's analysis and projections of economic developments at the global level, in major country groups, and many individual countries.

Retrieved on
April 25, 2025
Retrieved from
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/weo-database/2025/april
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
IMF. 2025. World Economic Outlook, April 2025. Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund. ©IMF. https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400289583.081

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Unemployment rate”, part of the following publication: Max Roser, Bertha Rohenkohl, Pablo Arriagada, Joe Hasell, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2023) - “Economic Growth”. Data adapted from International Monetary Fund. Retrieved from https://mdim-pisa.owid.pages.dev:8789/20250625-093257/grapher/unemployment-rate-imf.html [online resource] (archived on June 25, 2025).
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

International Monetary Fund (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

International Monetary Fund (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Unemployment rate” [dataset]. International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook (WEO) April 2025” [original data]. Retrieved July 11, 2025 from https://mdim-pisa.owid.pages.dev:8789/20250625-093257/grapher/unemployment-rate-imf.html (archived on June 25, 2025).