Unemployment — 1999 to Present

Monthly rate with administration bands and rolling averages

Author

Sam Caldwell

The heavy black line is actual unemployment (BLS civilian unemployment rate, monthly). Dashed colored lines are trailing rolling averages: 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year. The dashed grey line is a pandemic-adjusted 5-year average that excludes March 2020 – December 2021, the window where the labor market was severely distorted by COVID-19 and its aftermath.

Colored vertical bands show each presidential administration’s term.

Reading the chart

  • Heavy black — the raw monthly rate. Every movement you see is a BLS release.
  • 1-year (green dashed) — smooths away monthly noise but still follows cyclical turns. Useful for “where are we really right now?”
  • 5-year (orange dashed) — removes business-cycle noise. A rising 5-yr average signals structural labor-market deterioration; a falling one signals structural tightness.
  • 10-year (purple dashed) — secular trend; moves slowly. Currently dominated by the post-GFC recovery long plateau and the 2020 spike.
  • 5-year adjusted (grey dotted) — same 5-year window but excludes March 2020 – December 2021 observations. Shows what “normal” labor-market conditions looked like minus the pandemic shock. Useful when judging whether the current labor market is “tight” versus pre-pandemic norms rather than pandemic-distorted norms.

Why the pandemic exclusion matters

March 2020 – April 2020 saw unemployment spike from 3.5% to 14.7% in a single month — a once-in-a-century labor-market shock driven by public- health policy, not underlying economic conditions. Including those months in a trailing 5-year average keeps them in every window until ~March 2025, distorting any “how does the current rate compare to recent history” judgment throughout the Biden term and most of Trump’s second term.

The adjusted line answers: “Compared to the pre-pandemic trend, how does the current labor market look?”

Data source

BLS Civilian Unemployment Rate (FRED series UNRATE), monthly. Loaded from data/economy/monthly.csv which is refreshed daily from FRED. Administration boundaries from the presidential-economies analysis’s administrations.csv.