What is the name for the percentage of the labor force that is jobless and actively seeking work?

The unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that is jobless and actively seeking work.

Its denominator is the labor force, which consists of employed people plus unemployed people who meet the relevant availability and job-search criteria. In the commonly used U.S. measure, a person generally must have had no job, been available for work, and actively looked for work during the previous four weeks. The basic calculation is unemployed people divided by the labor force, multiplied by 100.

The measure is useful because it shows how much unused labor exists among people participating in the job market. It does not, however, count everyone without a job. Retirees, full-time students, and discouraged workers who have stopped searching are generally outside the labor force and therefore absent from the headline rate.

Underemployment is different: it can include people working part time who want full-time work. The labor-force participation rate instead measures the share of the working-age population that is employed or seeking employment.