The United States recorded a 24.9% unemployment rate in 1933 during the Great Depression.
The rate reached its highest annual level as industrial output, investment, and trade contracted sharply. Banks failed, businesses closed, and millions of workers lost their jobs after the 1929 financial collapse.
The figure refers to the annual unemployment rate, not the percentage of the entire population without work. Estimates for the era are reconstructed from historical labor data, because modern unemployment surveys did not yet exist.
Unemployment later declined during the New Deal recovery and fell substantially during the economic mobilization of World War II.